
Portability of tar features - echodevnull
https://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/articles/portability-of-tar-features.html
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raimue
Besides the supported tar features, bsdtar is definitely my favorite. With
libarchive it supports all kinds of archive formats, so you can work on .zip
and even .iso files with the usual command line interface.

[https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki/LibarchiveForm...](https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki/LibarchiveFormats)

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Aloha
yeah, bsdtar is my goto for dealing with archives for work projects,
specifically dealing with unpacking iso's.

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stefan_
Words to strike fear into the heart of every programmer:

 _The tar format is one of the oldest archive formats in use. ... it is ugly —
built as layers of hacks on the older format versions to overcome their
limitations. ... This article is directly inspired by my proof-of-concept work
on new binary package format_

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theamk
Somewhat famously, tar format is so bad, when kernel needed an compression
format for initrd, they went with cpio:
[https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-r...](https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-
rootfs-initramfs.txt)

Quote: "tar is ugly as hell and not going to be supported on the kernel side"

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zcid
This article was a great example of something that will never be useful to me,
but I was still willing to sink an hour into digesting it. Fascinating read.

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blattimwind
Python's stdlib module is coded in a rather messy way, but seems like it's
actually one of the better implementations of tar-ish formats.

