On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 8:26 PM, Szabolcs Nagy <n...@port70.net> wrote: > * Connor Lane Smith <c...@lubutu.com> [2010-08-06 15:10:29 +0100]: > >> I've written a tiny archiver, which I've called "wrap" for lack of a > > looks nice (nicer than tar, cpio or gnu ar) > >> I'm not quite sure of the use case for this, but I don't know, someone > > i'm not sure either > > but it'd be unixy to do > find dir | xargs | wrap c | sflate -c >dir.a
A reminder here: The common use case for an archiver is to archive quite a lot of files, so reading a list of files from stdin is probably necessary for practical use unless you assume that you can pass thousands of files as arguments. I like the idea, tar is bulky and outdated, cpio is difficult to use and suffer from a lot of the same problems as tar (designed at a time archiving meant streaming raw bytes to tape). After reading the source it seems a little less general purpose than I had hoped for though, but I can see the use of this anyway, for archiving things where you don't need to store ownership information, permission flags, named pipes, devices etc. More of a source-code archiver than a backup archiver.