tar -r on a diskfile/tar arg too long

[John Macdonald]

In article <3474 at auspex.auspex.com> guy at auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) writes:
|
| > My Fine Manual (SunOS 3.x) says the F option will exclude SCCS 
| >directories, FF will also exclude .o, errs, core and a.out files.
| >
| > Has this changed on SunOS 4.x, or in some other tar ???
|
|Apparently, since the other guy said that in his "tar" the "F" option
|specified a file giving a list of file names.  The original V7 "tar"
|didn't have *any* "F" flag, and the S5 "tar" still doesn't, as of the
|S5R3.1 3B2 source distribution....  Berkeley added the "F" flag you find
|in SunOS, and Sun picked it up from there.

The "F" as "next argument is a file containing file names" was in XENIX
release 7 and System III versions.  I don't know if it is still there in
current XENIX variants.  Until this discussion, I assumed that this useful
option was part of the standard (AT&T) tar code rather than being something
added by Microsoft/SCO - obviously I have not tried to use it in the last
couple of years.
-- 
Algol 60 was an improvment on most           | John Macdonald
of its successors - C.A.R. Hoare             |   jmm at eci386