alt Hacker Newstar/pax are kind of terrible formats. They are hard to implement correctly. I'm glad they are not used more often.
cpio is pretty reasonable though.
zip is actually pretty great and I've been growing increasingly fond of it over the years.
tar/pax are kind of terrible formats. They are hard to implement correctly. I'm glad they are not used more often.
cpio is pretty reasonable though.
zip is actually pretty great and I've been growing increasingly fond of it over the years.
The thing is, there is always tar(1) even in the most basic of distributions. And everyone uses tar.gz's or .bz2's or whatever for distributing all kinds of things, so tar is pretty ubiquitous. But the moment you want to do some C development, or any binutils-related, nope, install and use ar(1) which is used for literally one single purpose and nothing else. Because reasons.