On Tue, 24 Sep 2002, Michael Kukat wrote:

> Don't know if there is a real difference to your tar example, but the "pe"
> means "preserve everything". Does someone know why pax is used by sysinst? Is
> there a difference at all versus using tar?

The tar "p" option is for preserving permissions.

For untarring (and gunzipping) they are basically the same.

But pax can handle cpio and other archive formats too. They also offer a
variety of different features.

Also, tar is GPL licensed. (Note that some operating systems offer a tar
which is really a wrapper to pax. Then you could use gtar for GNU tar.)
And pax is BSD licensed.

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/