Re: [Sheflug] pax / tar

["Chris J" <cej [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I've looked at the man pages and feel more confused now.  And whats "The GNU
> folks, in general, abhor  man  pages,  and  create info  documents instead. " 
> all about.

It's all about annoying the community that expects man pages to exist. Whilst
I aggree that "info" is good for large manuals (e.g., gcc), for "how to use
a command in one easy lesson" man pages excel, plus thier more likely to
be available, and every admin expects them to be there.


> In particular I'm trying to unpack an archive using tar from tomsrtbt  - which
> isn't GNU tar but a wrapper for pax.  Unfortuately for me the archive I'm trying
> to unpack says use 
> tar --numeric-owner -xvzf file.tar.gz
> 
> and tomsrtbt tar doesn't have the --numeric-owner option
> 
> I can't get my head around what --numeric-owner actually does and which pax
> setting reproduces that. 

IIRC, pax first appeared in SunOS many many years ago (we're talking SunOS 4
here, pre-Solaris 2 days), and died a death, it hardly exists any more. Sun
still ship it, but I've not seen it on any other UNIX carry it.

I suspect, but a google to confirm this is proving tricky, that numeric-owner
stores the numeric value of the owner (i.e., the UID) in the archive rather
than the actual name of the user. In passwd terms, it stores field 3 rather
than field 1 :) That's my theory anyway.

If I find any more info about tar/pax conversion, I'll post.

Chris...

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\ Chris Johnson           \
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