[indiana-discuss] [osol-discuss] why gnu chmod in os2008.11?

[Joerg Schilling]

Julian Wiesener <jw at vtoc.de> wrote:

> i'm not sure if it is really necessary to have all the GNU tools
> preferred over Solaris tools. The most user expect GNU behaviour of tar
> (-z, -j), grep (-r), find (-iname, . as default path) and may be some

For most users, the GNU tar -z/-j behavior is not really helpful as it does not
automate things. star introduced automated compression detection 10 years ago.
It is much more convenient to let the tar program find the actual compression
method and to call the apropriate program. If you like to use GNU tar only 
because of -z/-j, you should find a better solution.

On the other side, GNU tar is unreliable. GNU tar still did not completely fix
a problem I reported in 1993 that causes GNU tar to stop unpacking archives in 
the middle without even giving proper warnings. This happens even with arechives
that have been created by GNU tar.

GNU tar by default does not create standard conforming archives and for this 
reason, GNU tar is the cause fore many interoperability problems.

GNU tools also typically ignore OS specific features, so what is the reason for 
using them?

Sun tar has onlx few features but thanks to the fact that Sun lstened to me and 
used my POSIX compliance test, Sun tar is POSIX.1-1988 compliant.

If you like to get a feature rich tar implementation, use star.

Jörg

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