Hi, Hal and list.

Actually, that's not correct. Just about all versions of tar now handle
fairly long filenames, but they all chose different ways to implement
it, since there is no office POSIX standard on how to do this for tar.

GNU chose one way, and almost every vendor implemented long
pathnames in their own way. So GNU tar was chosen as a portable
version of tar, in that it's available for almost every platform, and is
uniform in the way it handles the long paths.

STAR is another program that implemented a portable approach
to long paths, but POSIX now says that 'pax' is supposed to
replace tar as a portable archive format. In the real world, GNU tar
is the defacto standard, and has much better acceptance than pax.

If I recall, the author of star has a hisory of the problem on his site.

Hope this helps explain the situation,
--Carl





Hal DeVore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>@hdevore-013.bmc.com on 10/04/2001 04:09:18
PM

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Subject:  Re: XercesDef.hpp



> It's possible that you have been bit by the dreaded GNUtar bug

It's not a bug.  Or it's not a bug in GNU tar.  Back in ancient
times some(?) UNIXen only allowed filenames to be a total of 14
characters.  The original tar has no provisions for names longer
than that.  GNU tar allows long names.  Old versions of tar choke
on that as input.


--Hal



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