[gentoo-user] Re: Re: tar a brand new Gentoo install to a USB drive for safe keeping?

[Michael Schmarck <michael.schmarck@habmalnefrage.de>]

Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:

> On Tue, 06 May 2008 14:40:08 +0200, Michael Schmarck wrote:
> 
>> > That hasn't been needed for a long time. Tar is able to detect bzip2
>> > and gzip compression and handle it automatically.
>> 
>> That's only true for GNU tar. If you're also dealing with other
>> systems where you might not have GNU tar, you might be "surprised"
>> to find that "tar xvf file.tgz" doesn't work.
> 
> However, this thread is specifically about using tar on /Gentoo, which
> does use GNU tar.

Well, nonetheless I think that it's a bad idea to get too used to
GNUisms. Especially, if there are so easy "workarounds".

>> Hence I think, that it is a good idea to  keep on using z or j.
> 
> That really depends on the level of portability your scripts need. Using
> z or j is more portable, but also more complex for scripting.

That's rather a question of how complex the "environment" is, that the
script needs to deal with. If you really want to throw all different
sort of things at your script (like .tar.gz, .tar.Z, .tar.bz2, .tar.lzma),
then yes, the script would get more complex.

Michael

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