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- --- README File for Remote TAR ---
-
- This program has been put together by:
-
- Luigi Rizzo
- Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Univ. di Pisa
- via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (ITALY)
- email: luigi@iet.unipi.it
- tel: +39-50-568533 fax: +39-50-568511
-
-
- This is a modified version of GNU TAR, running on MSDOS and able to
- access the Unix file system via "rsh". The network support is a
- modified version of WATTCP libraries (originally created by Erick
- Engelke, Univ. of Waterloo, CA, ee@development.uwaterloo.ca) which
- compiles under MS-C 6.00 and MASM 5.0.
-
- I have included the full sources for TAR, plus my version of the WATTCP
- library. The modified WATTCP sources will be available shortly (mainly
- because of the lack of documentation!).
-
- You can use this program as a normal tar, with standard options. If you
- want to read/write to a Unix file (or device), you can specify the
- target file (the one after the -f option) as follows:
-
- host:user:password:target_file
-
- (the password can be omitted, in which case it will be requested at run
- time; an empty password must be specified as a minus sign, '-').
-
- The remote host is accessed via rexec to execute
-
- "cat - >target_file" (when writing)
-
- or
-
- "cat target_file" (when reading)
-
- so that tar can access the actual archive. The "-z" option will execute
- compress or zcat on the remote system, so that you end up with a
- compressed archive. As an additional option, you can specify the
- "-r" flag on the command line so that the target_file is interpreted as
- the command to be executed on the remote system. Thus, the following are
- equivalent:
-
- tar zcvf host:user:password:file.tar .
-
- tar rcvf "host:user:password: compress - > file.tar.Z" .
-
-
- The tar executing on the DOS machine will read from / write to the
- output/input of the command running on Unix.
-
- The whole thing might still have bugs, and it has not been thoroughly
- tested (take it as an 'alpha' version). If you find a bug or a fix,
- please send me a note.
-
- DISCLAIMER about possible bugs
- ==============================
-
- I wrote this program by merging an old version of GNU TAR, some
- routines to do directory searches (msd_dir), Erick Engelke's version of
- rsh and my version of WATTCP libraries. Thus I have not a complete
- knowledge of all of the sources. Nevertheless, I've done some backups
- and the program appears to work reasonably well. Among possible
- problems are the following:
-
- - Compilation has only been tried in SMALL model. I suspect the msd_dir
- routines have problems in large model.
-
- - I'm not quite sure on how wildcard in filenames are handled (but
- useful things like "tar tvf file.tar ." do work).
-
- - There might be problems with stack overflows with deep directory trees.
- ================================
-
-
- (Here follows the original README coming with the GNU TAR I used)
- ===========================================================
-
- This is a public domain tar(1) replacement. It implements the 'c',
- 'x', and 't' commands of Unix tar, and many of the options. It creates
- P1003 "Unix Standard" [draft 6] tapes by default, and can read and
- write both old and new formats. It can decompress tar archives when
- reading them from disk files (using the 'z' option), but cannot do so
- when writing, or when reading from a tape drive. Its verbose output
- looks more like "ls -l" than the Unix tar, and even lines up the
- columns. It is a little better at reading damaged tapes than Unix tar.
-
- It is designed to be a lot more efficient than the standard Unix tar;
- it does as little bcopy-ing as possible, and does file I/O in large
- blocks. On the other hand, it has not been timed or performance-tuned;
- it's just *designed* to be faster.
-
- On the Sun, the tar archives it creates under the 'old' option are
- byte-for-byte the same as those created by /bin/tar, except the trash
- at the end of each file and at the end of the archive.
-
- It was written and initially debugged on a Sun Workstation running
- 4.2BSD. It has been run on Xenix, Unisoft, Vax 4.2BSD, V7, and USG
- systems. I'm interested in finding people who will port it to other
- types of (Unix and non-Unix) systems, use it, and send back the
- changes; and people who will add the obscure tar options that they
- happen to use and I don't. In particular, VMS, MSDOS, Mac, Atari and
- Amiga versions would be handy.
-
- It still has a number of loose ends, marked by "FIXME" comments in the
- source. For example, it does not chown() extracted files. Fixes to
- these things are also welcome.
-
- I am the author of all the code in this program. I hereby place it in
- the public domain. If you modify it, or port it to another system,
- please send me back a copy, so I can keep a master source.
-
- John Gilmore
- Nebula Consultants
- 1504 Golden Gate Ave.
- San Francisco, California, USA 94115
- +1 415 931 4667 voice
- hoptoad!gnu data
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-
- @(#)README 1.5 86/10/29
-