Subject: Re: Removing GNU tar and GNU cpio from src?
To: None <tech-userlevel@netbsd.org>
From: Xavier HUMBERT <xavier.humbert@xavhome.fr.eu.org>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 01/20/2003 09:54:29
woods@weird.com (Greg A. Woods) wrote :

> Knowing when your backups are incomplete or even corrupt is a 
> "Good Thing(tm)"!

Yes, in certain circumstances. But I don't really care for the very few
last lines of /var/log/news, while I certainly want to have the
remaining of my /var partition dumped. My backup scrits mails me such
errors, but proceeds anyway, and returns 0.

At least, I'd like to have a return value for non-fatal errors, the
current version returns only 0 or 1 (this is not better than tar from
this point of view)

The whole point is that legacy tar could be used as a backup tool (the
-W --verify option is missing from pax, for example), while obviously
pax is designed for archiving only.

Well, we have gtar, but there are zillions of backup scripts around that
rely on (gnu)tar behavior, and break with pax as tar.

-- 
Xavier
http://www.freetibet.org
http://www.tibet.fr/