On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 12:58 PM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at 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. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com