Re: [dev] wrap: minimalist archiving tool

On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 8:26 PM, Szabolcs Nagy <nsz_AT_port70.net> wrote:
> * Connor Lane Smith <cls_AT_lubutu.com> [2010-08-06 15:10:29 +0100]:
>
>> I've written a tiny archiver, which I've called "wrap" for lack of a
>
> looks nice (nicer than tar, cpio or gnu ar)
>
>> I'm not quite sure of the use case for this, but I don't know, someone
>
> i'm not sure either
>
> but it'd be unixy to do
> find dir | xargs | wrap c | sflate -c >dir.a

A reminder here: The common use case for an archiver is to archive
quite a lot of files, so reading a list of files from stdin is
probably necessary for practical use unless you assume that you can
pass thousands of files as arguments.

I like the idea, tar is bulky and outdated, cpio is difficult to use
and suffer from a lot of the same problems as tar (designed at a time
archiving meant streaming raw bytes to tape).

After reading the source it seems a little less general purpose than I
had hoped for though, but I can see the use of this anyway, for
archiving things where you don't need to store ownership information,
permission flags, named pipes, devices etc. More of a source-code
archiver than a backup archiver.
Received on Mon Aug 09 2010 - 04:33:47 CEST