On Tue, 14 Jan 2003, Greg A. Woods wrote:

# > tar: Sorry, unable to determine archive format.
#
# But for this I bet the second tar's option flags need a leading '-':

This is a gratuitous change, if it's something we've done, and it should
be reverted.  Perfect example of backward combatability.

# 	tar -xpBf -
#
# which is more or less confirmed by your success with the 1.5 binary.
#
# Too many *BSD users have been too complacent about relying on ancient
# tar's really ancient interface quirks for too many years and still carry
# over this silly habit of not using the hyphen because they apparently
# don't like typing what they feel are unnecessary characters.  :-)

"woods.g", line 22:  ancient undefined

Don't like 'em with dump(8), either, but they're there -- but it's
optional, not mandatory.  The hyphen has been optional for so long, and a
lot of scripts rely on them, I bet, at least in tar's case.

"Do it right or don't do it."  "Right" in this case does not mean
"like everything else does".

				--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD: Agnostics in the Platform Religious Wars.