[CentOS] Bzip2 Compress directories

Thu Apr 23 10:36:30 UTC 2009
Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com>

At Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:51:33 -0700 (PDT) CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote:

> 
> Robert Heller wrote:
> 
> > Note that is also possible to use dump or cpio as well.  Unlike the
> > MS-Windows zip/unzip, which combines compressing and archiving in a
> > single program, the 'UNIX' way is to separate these functions.  bzip2
> > only compresses.  Other programs (tar, dump, cpio) create archives --
> > bundle a group of files and/or directory trees into a single file.
> 
> zip and some of the other compression tools also have a habbit
> of not preserving file system permissions or ownership, which can
> be handy in a backup, also may not support special devices(e.g.
> sockets, fifos, character/block device entries etc). If you rely
> upon file system ACLs on top of regular unix permissions things
> might get more complicated, I don't use ACLs, so don't have
> experience with preserving them in archives.

dump and *GNU* tar handle special files properly.  dump preserves all
ext2/ext3 permissions, etc.  Also preserves hard and soft links.

> 
> nate
> 
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
> 
>                                                                                      

-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933
Deepwoods Software        -- Download the Model Railroad System
http://www.deepsoft.com/  -- Binaries for Linux and MS-Windows
heller at deepsoft.com       -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ModelRailroadSystem/