Hi Tim,

Yes, you're right, tar is older. Nonetheless, can you think of any other reason 
why one would want to use tar, except for glueing files together in preparation 
of compression? I'm not sure what you mean by "property bundle up bits of code".

I don't think that tar is available on Windows by default, but that's another 
story.

--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
Homepage: http://economy-x-talk.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/xtalkprogrammer
KvK: 50277553

Get the extIco2Png external for LiveCode here http://qery.us/1w6

On 11 apr 2012, at 01:14, Tim Jones wrote:

> On Apr 10, 2012, at 4:02 PM, Mark Schonewille wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Tar is a bad idea because it glues files together and doesn't compress. Tar 
>> was invented to allow gzip to compress multiple files. It is easier and 
>> faster to use the zip command line tool rather than to use both tar and 
>> gzip. Many unix geeks still prefer tar+gzip but I'm not sure why.
> 
> Wha???
> 
> "tar" (Tape ARchiver) has been around since before we even considered 
> compression schemes.  It wasn't until the Linux / FreeBSD movement that 
> compression options were added.  On most systems still using AT&T tar 
> sources, you have to compress an archive after tar creates it and decompress 
> an archive before tar can extract its contents.
> 
> We prefer tar and a compressor because it allows up to properly bundle up 
> bits of code, regardless of the file types, and share them with others while 
> reduing the overall footprint required on disk and for transfer.  The tar app 
> is available in one form or another on every platform out there, so you can 
> pretty much always open another's tarball.
> 
> In fact, I believe Dennis' original PDP MULTIX 9-track install tapes used a 
> precursor to the modern tar format.
> 
> Tim


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