compression in Sco Unix tar

[Ti Kan]

In article <1990Dec30.071602.2786 at rden> rden at rden.gen.nz (Robert den Hartog) writes:
>
>How does one drive the compression in the new Sco Unix tar?  strings tell's
>me that it's there (references to compress and /usr/bin/compress) but the
>manual pages don't mention compression at all.

I don't really recommend using the compression "feature" of SCO tar,
since that makes your tar archive relatively non-portable.  However,
if you insist, to create a tar archive, use:

tar Cv ...

Note the upper case 'C' flag instead of the usual lower case 'c'.
To retrieve from a compressed archive, just retrieve normally with

tar xv ...

SCO tar will automatically determine that the archive is compressed,
and will uncompress each file.  If you want SCO tar to retrieve the
files but leave them compressed, then do:

tar Xv ...

Note the upper case 'X'.

Note that SCO probably didn't document the 'C' and 'X' options for
a reason.  so use these non-standard options at your own risk.

-Ti
-- 
Ti Kan | vorsprung durch technik!                                       \\\
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