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

[Tim Bray]

On Jan 17, 2009, at 4:29 AM, Joerg Schilling wrote:

> A serious problem with GNU tar is that it is unreliable and in a  
> signficant
> number of cases is unable to read back it's own archives.

I've been using tar on linux since about 1996 and I've never had such  
a failure, nor have I ever heard of anyone having one.  I'm not saying  
that it can't happen, I'm just saying that the experience of the  
community is that's an extremely reliable tool.

> Roughly at the same time as GNU tar introduced -z, star introduced
> auto-decompression. Why do you like to know about this detail if the  
> tar
> implementation could to this for you automagically based on the  
> compression
> header magic numbers?

My fingers are used to typing "tar -xzf" and as long as I don't get  
any stupid error messages and the data is unpacked, I'm happy. -T