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Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 14:20:57 -0800
From: Tim Kientzle <kientzle@acm.org>
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cc: Tillman Hodgson <tillman@seekingfire.com>
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Subject: Re: backing up ACLs
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 >>That said, however, if you're used to crufty old BSD tar
 >>or crufty new GNU tar, you might be surprised at what a
 >>good modern tar implementation can do.

joe mcguckin wrote:
> Will a 'modern' tar allow me to interactively  browse through the save-set
> and arbitrarily select files to be restored?

If you're willing to read the entire archive to build
the list, then there are several third-party shells
that provide this capability, complete with comfortable
point-and-click interfaces.

If you're not, then the implementations I'm familiar
with do not write a contents entry at the beginning
of the archive, so cannot easily provide this
capability.

However, the current "pax interchange format" introduced
by POSIX.1-2001 (supported by 'star' and libarchive, but not
supported by GNU tar) is designed to be easily extended, so
it wouldn't be at all difficult to add this capability.

Hmmmm....  I'll add that to my wish list for bsdtar.
Thanks for the idea,

Tim Kientzle