undocumented compress option to SCO tar

[Michael Davidson]

lubkin at cs.rochester.edu (Saul Lubkin) writes:

>There is an undocumented option to SCO Unix 3.2 v2 tar, that compresses
>files (using compress) when creating an archive, and that uncompresses
>them when restoring with tar.

Not quite correct - there is an option which will set a flag in the
tar header to indicate that a file should be uncompressed automatically
when tar extracts it. There is no support in tar for automatically
compressing files as they are being archived, using the "C" option
when creating a tar archive just sets a flag in the header to indicate
that tar should attempt to uncompress the files when they are extracted.

The "X" option will extract files but suppresses any attempt to
uncompress them.