(tar.info.gz) Portability

 
 8.3 Making `tar' Archives More Portable
 =======================================
 
 Creating a `tar' archive on a particular system that is meant to be
 useful later on many other machines and with other versions of `tar' is
 more challenging than you might think.  `tar' archive formats have been
 evolving since the first versions of Unix.  Many such formats are
 around, and are not always compatible with each other.  This section
 discusses a few problems, and gives some advice about making `tar'
 archives more portable.
 
    One golden rule is simplicity.  For example, limit your `tar'
 archives to contain only regular files and directories, avoiding other
 kind of special files.  Do not attempt to save sparse files or
 contiguous files as such.  Let's discuss a few more problems, in turn.

 
* Portable Names              Portable Names
* dereference                 Symbolic Links
* hard links                  Hard Links
* old                         Old V7 Archives
* ustar                       Ustar Archives
* gnu                         GNU and old GNU format archives.
* posix                       POSIX archives
* Checksumming                Checksumming Problems
* Large or Negative Values    Large files, negative time stamps, etc.
* Other Tars                  How to Extract GNU-Specific Data Using
                                 Other `tar' Implementations

Info Catalog

(tar.info.gz) Attributes

(tar.info.gz) Formats

(tar.info.gz) cpio

automatically generated by info2html

(tar.info.gz) Portability

Menu