Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!pdn!palan!sherpa!rac
From: rac@sherpa.UUCP (Roger Cornelius)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386
Subject: SCO's hacks to tar and compress
Message-ID: <307@sherpa.UUCP>
Date: 22 Aug 90 21:24:18 GMT
Organization: Personal System Computing,  St. Petersburg, FL
Lines: 18

Has anyone else noticed that the tar command distributed with
SCO UNIX has been hacked to allow magical decompression of
compressed files in an archive.

At least some of the distribution floppies (5 1/4" anyway) for the
version 2 upgrade contain compressed files (sans trailing .Z).  The
extraction phase somehow senses the files are compressed and pipes
them through compress with a -P option.  Try moving compress out of
your path and then extracting files from the upgrade floppies with
tar.  You should see an "execl: No such file or directory" error.

These changes also exist in the version 1 release.

The unfortunate thing about the changes to both tar and compress 
(new -P flag) is they didn't bother to document them.

-- 
Roger A. Cornelius          rac@sherpa.UUCP         uunet!sherpa!rac