tar format

[Joseph S. D. Yao]

In article <358 at ukecc.UUCP> edward at ukecc.UUCP (Edward C. Bennett) writes:
>	I'm sure this has been beaten to death before so please MAIL
>your responses.
Strangely, not, so I'll post my response.

>	When BSD tar creates an archive of a directory, it (by default)
>writes a tar header block for the directory itself. SysV tar doesn't do
>this. Is one way more 'correct' than the other? Is there an actual "standard"
>for tar written down somewhere? Should I bother to hack my SysV tar to
>write directory blocks?
>UUCP: ihnp4!cbosgd!ukma!ukecc!edward

On 4BSD, the 'o' flag specifies that directory blocks not be written
"for compatibility with previous versions."  This is not to be confused
with s5's 'o' flag which specifies on input that the files' ownership
not be changed to match the tape.  Personally, I prefer that the
directory information be passed, but so far I haven't bothered to hack
s5 tar (and make it non-SV-standard).

I'm not sure whether SVID addresses it (I'm pretty sure it doesn't).
However, the IEEE OS standard has a tape information interchange
standard that looks remarkably, I am told, like tar.	;-)
-- 

	Joe Yao		hadron!jsdy at seismo.{CSS.GOV,ARPA,UUCP}