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bsdtar's really nice. It's more a tar-flavour wrapper around libarchive, and thus has support for many formats: Read: tar, pax, cpio, zip, xar, lha, ar, cab,
by Freaky 11y ago
bsdtar's really nice. It's more a tar-flavour wrapper around libarchive, and thus has support for many formats:
Read: tar, pax, cpio, zip, xar, lha, ar, cab, mtree, rar, and ISO images.
Write: tar, pax, cpio, zip, xar, ar, ISO, mtree, and shar.
I believe it had tar compression detection significantly earlier than GNU tar too.
- JoshTriplett 11y agoInteresting example, thanks! There are generic tools like "unar", but it's interesting that in the BSD world tar grew those features instead. An odd counterpoint to the accusations of "bloat" often leveled at GNU.
- Freaky 11y agoThe other interpretation is that instead of reinventing the wheel purely for tar, it's all been factored out into a standardised library anything can use for generic archiving tasks. e.g. instead of: 440K gtar 151K gcpio 144K unzip Base has: 655K libarchive.so.6 57K bsdtar 37K bsdcpio 20K unzip 34K bigger, much wider format support, and directly usable by other tools like pkg and ar, as well as third party apps like tarsnap and cmake.