are:
* Implement cpio compatibility mode when pax is invoked as cpio
* Extend tar compatibility mode to cover many of the GNU tar single-letter
options (bzip2 mode, aka -y/-j is not present in OpenBSD). When
invoked as tar, pax is now full-featured enough for use by the ports
collection to extract distfiles and create packages.
* Many bug fixes to the operation of pax and the tar compatibility modes
* Code fixes for things like correct string buffer termination.
I tried to preserve existing FreeBSD fixes to this utility; please let me
know if I have inadvertently spammed something.
and compress) to pax when used in tar mode (invoked as 'tar') for
compatibility with GNU tar.
bzip2 functionality for further GNU tar compatibility will be added at a
later date.
Note in the manpage that -z is non-standard.
Obtained from: OpenBSD
Reviewed by: -hackers
MFC after: 2 weeks
This will make a number of things easier in the future, as well as (finally!)
avoiding the Id-smashing problem which has plagued developers for so long.
Boy, I'm glad we're not using sup anymore. This update would have been
insane otherwise.
oo
Turns out, it's pretty important if you use PAX for backup. In the man
page for PAX, there is an error (OK, we could call it a "potentially
catastrophic incompleteness"). It reads:
> The command:
>
> pax -r -v -f filename
>
> gives the verbose table of contents for an archive stored in filename.
Yup, it does do that. With a side effect: it also _replaces_ all the
files that come in from the archive. As is my custom, I did my
backup-validation real soon after the backup was written. Precisely
because I've seen the same sort of thing happen on other systems. So all
that file-restoring didn't do a lot of damage. Probably helped my
fragmentation somewhat (aha, an online defragger?) It did confuse one
hapless user, who lost an email message he _knew_ he hadn't deleted.
Apparently the system restored the file as of just before that critical
message came in.
The correct entry should read:
> The command:
>
> pax -v -f filename
>
> gives the verbose table of contents for an archive stored in filename.
Submitted by: John Beckett <jbeckett@southern.edu> via the BSDI mailing list