pax revisited

[John Klos <john%ziaspace.com@localhost>]

Hi, all,

Ages ago I wrote about the limitations of tar and it was suggested that I 
use pax, which I generally do these days. However, now I am running into 
problems with pax.

For some odd reason, we don't have a pax format available which handles 
long filenames and large files. Switching to cpio fixes the issues with 
long filenames which are problematic with the default ustar, but neither 
can handle files larger than 8 gigabytes.

Is this just because nobody's written BSD code for pax for the POSIX or 
pax formats? I'm not even sure where the pax format comes from, but it's 
mentioned in the GNU tar manual page:

http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/man/pax.1.html

and it looks quite good to me.

Is this something that might change in the future, or should I shop around 
for BSD-licensed pax format code?

Thanks,
John Klos