Greg A. Woods said:

>Really?  Archives with standard "ustar" encoding?  I'd be very surprised
>if that were true.  I haven't had any problems myself, nor have I heard
>from anyone I've ever created archives for.  Sun claims (at least ever
>since SunOS-5.6, up to and including SunOS-5.9) that their 'pax -x
>ustar' can extract any archive compliant with IEEE 1003.1(1990).  They
>also support 'xustar' in at least SunOS-5.9, which allows larger UID,
>GID, dev, etc. values and which supports 64-bit file offsets and
>pathnames greater than 255 chars.

Actually, I mean straight pax archives. NetBSD has some flags that would
create pax archives that Solaris can't read.

>Pax is extremely well defined both on the command line and in the
>archive format by IEEE POSIX and its imitators (eg. SuSv2).  That's the
>main point to using it, in fact.

If pax works with all tar archives, then that's fine. If someone puts in
rmt support then there is no reason that it couldn't replace the current
NetBSD/gnutar.

-- 
Rick Kelly  rmk@rmkhome.com  www.rmkhome.com