tar: Portability

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1 8.3 Making 'tar' Archives More Portable
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1 Creating a 'tar' archive on a particular system that is meant to be
1 useful later on many other machines and with other versions of 'tar' is
1 more challenging than you might think.  'tar' archive formats have been
1 evolving since the first versions of Unix.  Many such formats are
1 around, and are not always compatible with each other.  This section
1 discusses a few problems, and gives some advice about making 'tar'
1 archives more portable.
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1    One golden rule is simplicity.  For example, limit your 'tar'
1 archives to contain only regular files and directories, avoiding other
1 kind of special files.  Do not attempt to save sparse files or
1 contiguous files as such.  Let's discuss a few more problems, in turn.
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Menu

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· Portable Names              Portable Names
· dereference                 Symbolic Links
· hard links                  Hard Links
· old                         Old V7 Archives
· ustar                       Ustar Archives
· gnu                         GNU and old GNU format archives.
· posix                       POSIX archives
· Checksumming                Checksumming Problems
· Large or Negative Values    Large files, negative time stamps, etc.
· Other Tars                  How to Extract GNU-Specific Data Using
1                                 Other 'tar' Implementations
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