TAR DOES NOT SWAP BYTES

[Guy Harris]

> Agreed about cpio, but it's not clear that SysV has a real tar in all
> cases.  When I visited a site of ATTIS a couple of years ago, they
> insisted that I bring a cpio tape, since they weren't sure that their
> 3B20 tar could read tapes made on a VAX.  It turned out that I had left
> something off the cpio tape that was on my standard tar tape, so we
> caried the tar tape to a VAX, extracted the appropriate files, and
> write them out again with cpio to move them to the 3B.

I think the problem is with the 3B20 tape drive, not with "tar" on the 3B20.
Some tape controller (which I think they've junked in favor of a sane one)
imposes a rather small minimum block size; "tar cb 20 ..." exceeds this
limit.  This screws "cpio" over, too; this from CPIO(1) in the S5 User's
Manual:

	BUGS
	     ...The -B option does not work with certain magnetic
	     tape drivers (see UN32(7) in the UNIX System V Administrator
	     Reference Manual).

For some reason, the "tar" manual page doesn't contain a similar warning.
Perhaps the people who wrote it thought "tar" was a thing of the past, soon
to be completely replaced by "cpio".

	Guy Harris