> The latter two steps are done in one tar command:
> tar cf - passwd ls | tar -xf - -C /etc passwd -C bin ls
> 
> note the double use of the -C switch - this is what pax doesn't do.

pax does this a different way, using the s/old/new/ construction
to change pathnames.

pax can easily be set to record the @cwd directives as prefix1,
prefix2, ... prefixn when the binary package is created, and, when
extracting, using a substitution to restore the original @cwd
directory.

Regards,
Alistair