tar or gtar

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Giorgos Keramidas wrote:

>Hmmm, I'm not sitting on FreeBSD, but looking at the manpage I can only
>see -y (bzip2 compression) and -z (gzip compression); I couldn't find an
>option called -Z.
>
-Z is compress -- possibly gtar only.  It's much worse than the 
alternatives and is only useful for compatibility.  I still see .Z files 
occasionally.  A bit surprised to see it completely missing from bsd tar.

$ tar -cZf foo.tar.Z foo
tar: .Z compression not supported

So it's still recognised at some level.

In fact

$ tar -cf foo.tar foo
$ compress foo.tar
$ tar -tZf foo.tar.Z
foo
foo/files
foo/files/patch-Makefile.in
foo/distinfo
foo/pkg-descr
foo/pkg-plist
foo/Makefile

So it will still unpack.  Presumably won't create since gzip is now 
ubiquitous and compress is awful by comparison.


--Alex