Sean B. Palmer wrote:
It does not appear that -r works in conjunction with -j: ... Are they really incompatible? Or is the functionality of using them together just broken? Note that -A and -j don't appear to work together either.
Practically speaking, they are fundamentally incompatible. "In theory", bzip2 compression could handle in-place modification, but it would require that tar have deep specific knowledge of bzip2 compression. (It would have to know how to locate bzip2 compressed blocks, decompress and modify the final block(s) and then append new blocks.) If you really need this, you might try bsdtar. It has a "streaming update" capability that can read an archive from one file, modify it on the fly and write the result to another file. This can handle routine "append" and "remove" operations even with compressed archives. Tim Kientzle
