GNU tar - Footnotes

# GNU tar: an archiver tool

## FTP release, version 1.13, 16 June 1999

### (1)

Clustering many options, the last of which has an argument, is a rather opaque way to write options. Some wonder if GNU `getopt` should not even be made helpful enough for considering such usages as invalid.

### (2)

Beware that if you precede options with a dash, you are announcing the short option style instead of the old option style; short options are decoded differently.

### (3)

Before GNU `tar` version 1.11.6, a bug prevented intermixing old style options with mnemonic options in some cases.

### (4)

There are plans to merge the `cpio` and `tar` packages into a single one which would be called `paxutils`. So, who knows if, one of this days, the `--version` would not yield ``tar (GNU paxutils) 3.2'`

### (5)

This is well described in Unix-haters Handbook, by Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise & Steven Strassmann, IDG Books, ISBN 1-56884-203-1.

### (6)

Well! We should say the whole truth, here. When `--sparse` (`-S`) is selected while creating an archive, the current `tar` algorithm requires sparse files to be read twice, not once. We hope to develop a new archive format for saving sparse files in which one pass will be sufficient.

### (7)

Previous versions of `tar` used full regular expression matching, or before that, only exact string matching, instead of wildcard matchers. We decided for the sake of simplicity to use a uniform matching device through `tar`.

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