with v1.21(on an open SuSE 11.2 system since they may have modified it) I have noticed that the f- form for either read from stdin or write to stdout is no longer available. This is a long-standing part of the tar interface, and a bit of a PITB to lose. I've been working with *nix systems for a longish time and have always used the following to copy filesystems:
tar cpvf- * | ( cd /mnt ; tar xpf- ) with the new partition mounted at /mnt GNU tar has always been better at this since it did not have the broken restrictions on subdirectory depth that SysV tar had. I could argue, that the default for *nix programs is to take input from stdin, in the absence of an input file, and to send output to stdout in the absence of an output file, but I suspect that my argument would be falling on deaf ears. This happened previously a few years ago, but AFAIK, the original syntax was restored. Of course, if you could point me to the right general place in the source, I believe that this is likely to be within my "fixing" ability. Thanks, -Don -- Don Gingrich [email protected] School of CSIT, RMIT Melbourne, Au [email protected] [email protected] http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~gingrich for gpg public key
