> > I believe our stock tar is now a front-end for pax.
> 
> Um.  I fetched the then-most-recent-available i386 snapshot and in it,
> /usr/bin/tar claims (when run with --version) to be GNU tar.

Hmm, perhaps it's still talk and no one has gone out and done it yet.

> Thus, it never has to remember modes for more than the chain of
> directories leading to the currently-being-extracted object.  The
> downside, of course, is that it breaks if the archive reads something

Yeah, this is what I had in mind. It'll work for distribution sets, but
not for arbitrary archives.

Sounds like we should do the experiment and see how the crunched version
of your tar compares to the crunched version of pax.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com