On Sat, Jul 06, 2013 at 10:53:01PM -0500, Galos, David wrote: > > I also see it a lot in scripts, along with using full options instead > > of short--perhaps to be more verbose? So, for compatibility, perhaps it > > is best to allow both. > If you mean GNU --long-options, then never in a million years :) If > you mean both dashed and non, that is likely what I will do. > > Based on the very high incidence of use of non-dashed options, their > inclusion is justifiable. In order to nicely support this, I think > that the best option will be to attempt ARGBEGIN parsing, and as long > as no flags are present, to fall back on simple non-dashed parsing. >
You also could roll your own option parser. Which in this case is called for, I think. > > tar xzf filename.tar.gz -C ~/scratch/ > Crap. > The -C flag seems like a good idea, but why'd you have to go > and mix dashed and non like that? > One way I also find myself using quite often: tar xfC filename.tar.gz directory tar xCf directory filename.tar.gz > > I usually use: > > > > gunzip < file.tar.gz | tar xf - > Why can't everyone be more like you? > Convenience. ;-) > I see that a lot of people rely on tar's integration with gzip,bzip2,xz,etc. > Although convenient, it sucks, because that exact functionality can > be so beautifully achieved with pipelines. Using a shell script to wrap > tar with compression is trivial, but also defeats the whole point of > complicating tar's option parsing for compatibility reasons. > You are right, of course. I have also seen problems with this approach when it comes to parallelizing the decompression step (with the pipe approach you can swap gzip for a parallel version of gzip, with the gtar compression autodetection you cannot short of hacks like symlinking you parallel gzip to gzip and putting it first in PATH or so). > For now, tar will not do compression. If sbase gains programs to do > compression, and the code is nicely librarized, I will consider thinking > about considering adding letting tar do that. > Wait, libz and libbz2 and xzlib are not suckless enough? > > David Galos Ciao, Markus
