On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 08:54:49PM +0200, Christian Maeder wrote:
Is there something like pax(1) available on solaris? If so, it should be be preferred, because it's a POSIX tool, so there's some hope that it behaves the same on different systems.
Yes, pax is available under solaris. I thought GNU tar is the standard packer under unix.
Depends on what `standard' means ;-) - tar has been there forever on unices, with several slightly incompatible format extensions - GNU tar is just another implementation, typically used on Linux, and it has its own incompatible format extensions. - pax is (or should be) available everywhere, its behaviour is defined by POSIX, it should (by default) create archives readable by most tar implemenations, but almost nobody knows about it ;-) http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/pax.html I wonder wether Duncan did read and understood that bit of documentation, I didn't even read all of it ;-)
(The usage message of pax is less clear.)
The manpage (and of course the POSIX definition) are hard stuff, too. However, to create an archive, you can use something like $ pax -wf foo.tar directory Ciao, Kili