[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[Clem Cole]

Dave -- please, let's not re-live 'tar-wars'   -- it's why the POSIX
command is called 'pax' - God Bless USENIX for funding the original
implementation and putting it in the public domain.

- tar was research/BSD and worked best when you chdir to some directory and
were working interactively and was the logic follow on to the earlier stp
and tp. It was ASCII and after the binary issues of tp was a welcome
relief. The format was also extensible (thanks to bug in the original
implementation).
- cpio was USG and worked best with a find(1) script/automation - which was
good for controlled distributions but poor for interactive use. It was also
binary originally (with PDP-11isms builtin)

The real issue in the end was cpio being part of System III many/most
universities did not have it originally, so the tp/stp was what we used,
which was replaced by tar.

pax has a user interface that work either ways, and the USENIX public
implementation can read both tape formats..

Clem

PS At Masscomp, I once wrote "car" but no one ever wrote "tpio".

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020 at 4:50 PM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 6 Mar 2020, Andy Kosela wrote:
>
> [ List elided ]
>
> What do you have against "cpio"?  Admittedly it's harder to use than "tar"
> but I still come across it from time to time; also, "tar" had a bug at one
> time whereby it did not handle an empty directory, and I think there was a
> problem with devices/sockets as well.
>
> Heck, I still have "cpio -adplumv" burned into my retinas.
>
> -- Dave
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