This is a public domain tar(1) replacement. It implements the 'c',
'x', and 't' commands of Unix tar, and many of the options. It creates
P1003 "Unix Standard" [draft 6] tapes by default, and can read and
write both old and new formats. It can decompress tar archives when
reading them from disk files (using the 'z' option), but cannot do so
when writing, or when reading from a tape drive. Its verbose output
looks more like "ls -l" than the Unix tar, and even lines up the
columns. It is a little better at reading damaged tapes than Unix tar.

It is designed to be a lot more efficient than the standard Unix tar;
it does as little bcopy-ing as possible, and does file I/O in large
blocks. On the other hand, it has not been timed or performance-tuned;
it's just *designed* to be faster.

On the Sun, the tar archives it creates under the 'old' option are
byte-for-byte the same as those created by /bin/tar, except the trash
at the end of each file and at the end of the archive.

It was written and initially debugged on a Sun Workstation running
4.2BSD. It has been run on Xenix, Unisoft, Vax 4.2BSD, V7, and USG
systems. I'm interested in finding people who will port it to other
types of (Unix and non-Unix) systems, use it, and send back the
changes; and people who will add the obscure tar options that they
happen to use and I don't. In particular, VMS, MSDOS, Mac, Atari and
Amiga versions would be handy.

It still has a number of loose ends, marked by "FIXME" comments in the
source. For example, it does not chown() extracted files. Fixes to
these things are also welcome.

I am the author of all the code in this program. I hereby place it in
the public domain. If you modify it, or port it to another system,
please send me back a copy, so I can keep a master source.

John Gilmore
Nebula Consultants
1504 Golden Gate Ave.
San Francisco, California, USA 94115
+1 415 931 4667voice
hoptoad!gnudata
[email protected]
Hoptoad talks to sun, ptsfa, well, lll-crg, ihnp4, cbosgd, ucsfcgl, pyramid.

@(#)README 1.586/10/29