On Mar 7, 2010, at 3:15 PM, Chuck Swiger wrote: > Hi-- > > On Mar 7, 2010, at 7:11 AM, Tony wrote: >> With OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), Apple switched (again) to bsdtar. OS X 10.5 >> included an Apple-Modified GNU Tar 1.15.1 that was resource fork aware. I >> would like to use GNU Tar 1.22 and wanted to know if 1.22 was OS X resource >> fork aware, or if a patch exists that can make it so. > > 10.6 comes with both bsdtar 2.6.2 and GNU tar 1.17 (which was the last > version under GPLv2); change the /usr/bin/tar symlink to point to gnutar > instead if you prefer. > > However, both support resource forks via the same "._FILE" mechanism (or > FILE/rsrc/NamedFork) implemented at the filesystem level. Quick testing > suggests that both bsdtar and gnutar both create archives and can extract > files with resource forks properly, and they also do fine extracting an > archive created with the other flavor of tar. I'm unsure of what you hope to > gain, but you should be able to build and use gnutar 1.22 instead if you > like.... > > Regards, > -- > -Chuck >
Thanks Chuck, I didn't realize that OS X had GNU tar 1.17 (I had copied 1.15.1 to my usr/local/bin directory). My reason for using GNU Tar instead of bsdtar is GNU Tar's support for Multi-Volume Archives (i.e. to back-up iPhoto to DVD's). I'll use GNU tar 1.17 that's included with OS X 10.6 Tony
