On Thu, 9 Jul 1998, Mason Loring Bliss wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 08, 1998 at 02:28:17PM -0700, Aaron Nelson wrote:
> 
> > According to the man page (if I unstood it correctly), you can't mix
> > argument styles ( these styles being no dash 'tar cvf', single dash 'tar
> > -c -v -f', and double dash 'tar --create --verbose --file').
> 
> Eh? I don't remember the last time I did a binary upgrade without it
> involving `tar --unlink -xvpf`.
> 
> I don't see where the man page prohibits this, and it seems to work in
> practise...
> 

I agree that I too have always used (with great success)
 `tar --unlink -xvpf`, however I see:

dan@dinah-moe (146)-% uname -msr
NetBSD 1.3 mac68k
dan@dinah-moe (147)-% tar --version
GNU tar version 1.11.2


and the printed gnu tar manual for version 1.12 says:

/start quote
3.3.4 Mixing Option Styles

	All three styles may be intermixed in a single tar command so long
as the rules for each style are respected.  Old style options and either
of the modern styles of options may be mixed withing a single tar command.
However, old style options must be introduced as the first arguments only,
following the rule for old options (old options must appear directly after
the tar command and some whitespace).  Modern options may be given only
after all arguments to the old options have been collected.  If this rule
is not respected, a modern option might be falsely interpreted as the
value of the argument to one of the old style options.

/end quote

there is a footnote that says "before gnu tar version 1.11.6 a bug
prevented intermixing old style options with mnemonic options in some
cases."




--Dan