differance between tar and gtar.

[amipankaj]

hello experts,

recently i got client's request to install gtar on server. can anybody please let me know ...whats the differance in gtar and tar.


thanks,
Roy

[Pete Randall]

Roy,

I took this from the Porting and Archive Center's description:

"Although tar is supplied with HP-UX, gtar has more options and handles absolute paths as relative paths, restores the original dates of directories when extracting and also supports large file systems."

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Gnu/tar-1.19/


Pete

[amipankaj]

thanks pete, is the tar command used gtar is there for GUN TAR?

[Pete Randall]

Yes, gtar refers to the GNU version of tar.


Pete

[amipankaj]

okhie pete thats good. i would like to know whether there is few more opsion in tar only or there a command with name gtar.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Roy:

Gnu's 'tar' is far more robust than the HP-uX version:

http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/tar.html

As yet another alternative, consider using 'pax':

http://docs.hp.com/en/B2355-60130/pax.1.html

The 'pax' utility can handle (read and write) 'tar' archives and is destined to be the replacement for the HP-UX proprietary 'fbackup'/'frestore' in the future.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Dennis Handly]

>JRF: pax ... is destined to be the replacement for the fbackup/frestore

I would suggest that "replacement" is probably a little inaccurate due to missing features. ;-)

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again) Roy:

> Dennis: I would suggest that "replacement" is probably a little inaccurate due to missing features. ;-)

I wholly agree with you. However, it is documented as I wrote and I suspect hardening as we muse.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Steven Schweda]

Don't these programs come with documentation?

> hello experts,

Read more, and become an expert yourself.

[amipankaj]

thanks guys....