On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 12:58 PM, Alan McKay alan.mckay@gmail.com wrote:
Are you reading something that favors Solaris/*bsd over GNU based systems?
No, why, are the Schily tools standard over there?
Not necessarily - just that GNUtar is not ubiquitous and there might be more concern about strict UStar format compliance.
I've never had any doubts that current GNU tar would extract archives made with it 10+ years ago - in fact I'm fairly sure I've done that. Or that I'd be able to obtain a copy of it in the future.
Yeah, that is the plus side. But it seems gtar is rather abysmal at recovering from errors in archives so if there is ever a problem, you're cooked.
Is there any truth to that?
I don't think so - I'm fairly sure I've seen GNUtar complain about bad headers, say 'skipping to next header' and then find something. It won't do that if you used the -z option because you generally can't recover from errors in compression. But, I've never seen a tape drive recover from an error and continue past it anyway so in practice that's not going to matter. If you are concerned about errors, keep more copies.