tar problems with SCO

[Chuck Karish]

In article <249 at mgse.UUCP> marks at mgse.UUCP (Mark Seiffert) wrote:
>I am having a problem with SCO's tar program. i wonder if others have
>had the same problem, and what they did.
>

[ Very large directories get archived repeatedly. ]
>I have two 337MB hard drives on a 286 clone running SCO Xenix 286 rel 2.2.1.

>Since this 2.2.2 seems to be current for the 286 version, ...

(My AT has 2.2.3 on it now.  I hear that the Tandy version is called
2.2.4.)

I have a different problem with SCO tar.  The SCO tar header structure
has three special fields added, to cope with files that are split
across a volume boundary.  Unfortunately, other vendors may leave
garbage in the end of the header block, or put in the information
required for POSIX tar.  This can cause SCO tar to complain about every
file on a tape, and require user intervention if certain patterns are
found.

I'd like to replace tar.

Has anyone made Mark Colburn's pax program run under XENIX?  If no one
else has made it go on a 286, I'll do it.

For those of you who don't know about pax, it supports the POSIX tar
and cpio archive formats, the traditional tar and cpio user interfaces,
and the new pax user interface created by the POSIX 1003.2 committee.
It's backward compatible with the old tar and cpio formats.
The source is freely distributable.

	Chuck Karish		{decwrl,hpda}!mindcrf!karish
	(415) 493-7277		karish at forel.stanford.edu