On Wed, 6 Dec 2006, Uwe Dippel wrote:
> Woodchuck: Thanks for the confirmation of tar being frontend to pax. Then,
> what is the good reason that the frontend kind of suppresses the
> abilities of the underlying routine ?
tar is not a "frontend" to pax. Thesey share the same code, and are in
fact the same executable. The pax format is different from the ustar
format.
The ustar format is defined by POSIX and does not allow for filename
larger than 100 chars or path names larger than 255 chars.
GNU choose to provide an extension, at the cost of reduced interoperability.
I use dump and restore for backup, they were made for that and have
the nice feature of being able to do incremental backups.
-Otto
