On GNU/Linux and on other Posix systems, the usual way to serialize a branch of the file system tree is to make a "tarball". Those tarballs are used to distribute programs and other packages but since I'm posting to help-tar you probably all know that.
Tar handle the serialization and let another program take care of the compression. This is very good and two popular such programs are gzip and bzip2. Since most tarballs are distributed compressed, GNU tar support command line arguments to trigger the invocation of the (un)compression system. The command line interface uses different command line options for different compression systems. This makes a lot of sense if you are creating a tarball: you can decide how you want to compress it; you may go for bzip2 to get a better compression ratio at the cost of more runtime or you may choose gzip to minimize CPU work. But for tarball extraction, it makes little sense to require the user to specify the compression algorithm since it can be safely inferred from the tarball meta-data. For this reason, I'm looking for a command line option to GNU tar that would just invoke the right decompression system. Is such option already in there? If so, I'm sorry for this message and I will RTFM ASAP. I'd like to point out though that I did RTFM and that if such option exists it might benefit from cross reference in the texinfo sections mentioning -x and -j If not such option exists, I would like to know if there is something that prevents its implementation. I understand that GNU tar does more than just tarball management and that when working on streams, inspection of the meta-data might not be an option. I could write myself wrapper script and I would be done by the time it took me to write this email but I feel that I would help more users if I implement this option right into GNU tar. Regards, -- Yannick Gingras _______________________________________________ Help-tar mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-tar
