On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 17:46, Gabriel Linder wrote: > I see more and more tar.xz archives, and thought it would be nice to > have tar able to extract them directly as with gzip/bzip2. > > -J is what GNU and FreeBSD use, so I used it too. Based on what was done > to add bzip2 support.
So I never quite finished it in time before the -j patch went in, but I think tar should just auto detect the compression and use the right program. It requires reading about two bytes out of the stream. It's a little tricky if the data is piped in, but I don't think it's intractable. So -z would just always do the right thing. I think that's a better way to do it. And if you want to make such a crazy archive, those people will just have to do it the hard way.
