tar under Interactive unix

[Gregory G. Woodbury]

In <3494 at skye.ed.ac.uk> richard at aiai.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) writes:
>
>Can it really be that under Interactive "tar cv" writes the names of the
>files to standard output, so that "tar cvf -" produces a corrupted file?
>Is this standard System V brain damage?
>
>-- a BSD user
	A BSD BIGOT more descriptively.

Whatever the ISC supplied "tar" does is whatever it does.  By
definition, tar is an imported command to System V from the BSD
universe.  Whatever they did to it sure made it incompatible.  This is a
problem with a variety of tar imports to system V.  It does not seem to
be constant from one sV version to another.

I gave up trying to figure out just what was wrong with all the bloody
tar variants that I have seen on various machines were doing.  I fetched
the "pdtar" program from one of the sources archives (thanks, UUnet!)
and just use that as the tar command when necessary.

Brain damage can just as easily be attributed to BSD as to System V.
It can also be attributed to stoopid users.
-- 
Gregory G. Woodbury @ The Wolves Den UNIX, Durham NC
UUCP: ...dukcds!wolves!ggw   ...mcnc!wolves!ggw           [use the maps!]
Domain: ggw at cds.duke.edu     ggw%wolves at mcnc.mcnc.org
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