[geeks] Quickest way

Scott Howard scott at doc.net.au
Thu Oct 9 08:27:45 CDT 2003


On Wed, Oct 08, 2003 at 12:53:22PM -0700, N. Miller wrote:
> >cd /opt; tar cvpf - sfw | (cd /usr ; tar xvpf - )
> >
> >In what respect do these not work?
> 
> Stock tar under Solaris has a problem with depth if I
> recall correctly.

Nope. The tar standard breaks down when you get to file/path names which
are longer than about 100 characters.

Beyond 100 characters everyone does something different, which means
that there are incompatibilities between many different vendors tar
implementations beyond 100 chars.

However, if you both tar and untar things with the same vendors tar there
wont be a problem.

Having said all that, if you've got pathnames > 100 chars in /opt/sfw
then you're doing something really weird.

  Scott



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