[clue] is tar deprecated? (talk)

[chris fedde]

There is plenty of room for lots of different kinds of bundling tools.
 Many have nitches, some are more widely used than others. The parade
of tools includes ar, tar, cpio, pax, shar, uuencode, bundle,
dump/restore, zip, rar, off the top of my head and probably many many
others.  I doubt we'll ever be able to say that any one tool is dead.

I'm a big fan of pax.  Pax has command line semantics similar to cpio
so it can take a list of file names from stdin and create an archive
of them.  I'm also a fan of pipelines.  It's probably one of the
features that makes unix great.   You can stitch together simple tools
in ways ways that would require a much more complex tool if you
required a gui or a single program with command line options to do it.

   "find . -name '.html'  -or  -name '.png' | pax -w | ssh remote ' cd
~/web/project; pax -rv' "


On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 1:12 PM,  <dennisjperkins at comcast.net> wrote:
> I've never heard of Pax.  According to the Wikipedia article, it is supposed
> to be included in all LSB-compliant systems.
>
> Pax appears to be a solution in search of a problem.
>
> ________________________________
> From: "Will" <will.sterling at gmail.com>
> To: "CLUE's mailing list" <clue at cluedenver.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2011 12:13:43 PM
> Subject: Re: [clue] is tar deprecated? (talk)
>
> I thought I'd add a side note.
>   In UNIX/POSIX it was decided many moons ago to deprecate tar and cpio and
> replace them with a new command called pax.  GNUs continued use and updating
> of both tar and cpio as well as the commercial UNIXes including the GNU
> core utilities seems to have stopped the move to pax in common usage.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_(Unix)
>
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 10:42 AM, Dan Kulinski <daniel at kulinski.net> wrote:
>>
>> Tar allows you to concatenate files together.  Gzip allows you to compress
>> a single file (although there is support for concatenated gzip files).  .Tgz
>> is the operation of both of these.  A Zip file is structured in such a way
>> that it provides both the storage container and the compression at the same
>> time.  In fact if you explore a Zip file you will find that each file itself
>> will generally undergo different compressions.  However, there is a distinct
>> disadvantage to this, the compression can not take advantage of redundancy
>> in multiple files so the archives are not as compact.
>>
>> Although now well understood, the Zip file format is not as open as the
>> .tar.gz file format.  It was originally designed by PKWARE and the
>> specifications were trademarked.
>>
>> As far as file interchange goes, .zip is currently more universal as
>> Windows, Mac OS X and Linux generally have built in decompressors.  Mac OS X
>> and Linux can by default address TAR and GZIP files.
>>
>> On UNIX and UNIX like systems I always tend to use tar and gzip together
>> because I know they exist on the systems.  Debian for instance usually
>> doesn't include the unzip utility by default.
>>
>> Dan Kulinski
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 10:30 AM, Mike Bean <beandaemon at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Our SQL guy asked me an interesting question, I didn't honestly have an
>>> answer, I thought it might be worthwhile to pose to the group.  He doesn't
>>> understand why .tgz is still in use.  To his mind, gzip renders the
>>> usefulness of tar questionable.  So why tar a file and THEN zip it, when you
>>> can just zip it???
>>> I honestly didn't know how to respond.  Any insights?
>>> Mike Bean
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>>
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