Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!gatech!rebel!george
From: george@rebel.UUCP (George M. Sipe)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: PDTAR for Msdos success?
Keywords: compiles arc non-converting
Message-ID: <40615@rebel.UUCP>
Date: 23 Jul 88 18:05:50 GMT
References: <289@island.uu.net>
Reply-To: george@rebel.UUCP (George M. Sipe)
Organization: Tolerant Systems, Atlanta GA
Lines: 34

In article <289@island.uu.net> daniel@island.uu.net (Dan Smith) writes:
>
>	Late last year, John Gilmore posted an excellent implementation
>of tar. It's a great replacement for the tar that comes with BSD Unix.
>Although it was supposed to compile for Msdos as well, I never was able
>to. Someone else ported John's work to Msdos, but then decided it
>would be a good idea to start converting every text file in sight
>(a no-no!) to/from Msdos/Unix. Among other bugs/features, this person's
>derivation (the name isn't handy at the moment) made all .arc files
>in a tar archive zero length. That made the program unusable for
>my purposes.

The 'someone else' was Eric Roskos.  I too was disturbed by assuming
everything except .COM and .EXE were text.  Although a command line flag
was available to add to the list, it was cumbersome to use.

Therefore, I extended the builtin list to be:  ARC, BIN, CAL, CFG, COM,
DIF, DB?, EXE, GIF, LIB, MAC, NDX, OBJ, 00?, OV?, PIC, RBS, RX?, SLK,
SYL, SYS, TAR, UUE, WK?, XL?, and ZOO.  This was relatively easy and
I've not had any other problems since.  Note that I also permit '?' as a
wildcard character at the tail of the extension.

One other minor change I made was to default to not overwritting
existing files.  In addition to being safer in general, it overcomes a
problem with bogus files after the end of the archive produced by
certain *nix systems.

If anyone is interested in the source or binary for this send me
E-mail.  (Note: ask for source OR binary).

-- 
George M. Sipe,		Phone: (404) 662-1533
Tolerant Systems, 6961 Peachtree Industrial, Norcross, GA  30071
UUCP: ...!{decvax,hplabs,linus,rutgers,seismo}!gatech!rebel!george