Date: Mon, 7 Aug 1995 14:52:55 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: dan hitt <acoustic AT infinity DOT c2 DOT org>
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: looking for tar or gnutar


On 7 Aug 1995, dan hitt wrote:

> I'm looking for tar or gnutar for djgpp/msdos.
> 
> The bundled tar djtarx does not seem to have the same
> semantics as tar (it seems to be mainly for unarchiving,
> as far as i can tell from poking on it and looking at the
> faq).
> [snip]
> (I need tar or gnutar ultimately for reading from and writing to
> a raw device on msdos, which i suppose may be its own adventure . . .)

Did you know that djtarx can read tar's on Unix diskettes (created with 
a command such as ``tar cvf /dev/rfd0c *.c'')?  It cannot create tar 
files, that's true, neither does it have that plethora of options which 
GNU tar supports.  For those, you might use one of the following 
programs:

	1) A DOS port of GNU tar 1.11.2 available by anonymous ftp from 
ftp://ftp.mcs.com/mcsnet.users/les/dos-gnutar/.  It supports raw diskette 
read/write and also remote network tape access.  (There is also a Win3.1 
version in .../les/win-gnutar/ there.)

	2) A tar clone available as
ftp://ftp.kiae.su/.1/msdos/arcers/tar320cp.zip.  This one is a GNU tar
clone, doesn't have all of its options, but it does know how to read and
write to a diskette and also supports on-the-fly compression and
decompression with both compress and GNU Zip methods.  (A crippled version
which supports only one compression method, to avoid the infamous
compression patent issue, is available as tar320c.zip on SimTel mirrors.)
It also supports local tapes (don't remember how about networked tapes).

I use both programs and they work (as does djtarx).