On Fri, 14 Nov 1997, Jonathan Stone wrote:

: You invoked standards. What do the standards have to say about the
: behavour of `tar --unlink'?  Hmmm?

Nothing, but I'd expect getopt(3) semantics for any command's one-letter
options where a dash is involved in the options.  Whether --unlink works
with the old style options is not for me to say, but since the double dash
GNU options are extensions to getopt, I'd expect to have to use dashes with
the rest of the options on the command line.

: Personally, I think it would be nice to fix tar so --unlink allowed
: the old-style flags. Can we do that?
: 
: If not, why not add a `U` option (equivalent to --unlink) to both the
: `historic' flags and the getopt(3) flag set?  Who *cares* if it's
: nonstandard? You just said historic tar is nonstandard anyway, so
: we're in undefined territory, just like --unlink.

The latter sounds better, because it could be used in a single dash
environment too, and would be nice to have for the next thing you mention:

: BTW, what does our pax do?  Wasn't there talk of subsituting that for
: GNU tar sometime this year?

Dunno; OpenBSD did this at one point, and they had a lot of "cleaning up" to
do to get it to work just like tar.  :)

=====
== Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Business tv@lucent.com)
== So you know what, Mikey?  Go to bed.