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- PAX - Portable Archive Interchange
-
- Copyright (C) 1989 Mark H. Colburn
- All Rights Reserved.
-
-
- Introduction
-
- This is version 1.1 of Pax, a public domain archiving utility.
-
- Pax is an archiving utility that reads and writes tar and cpio formats,
- both the traditional ones and the extended formats specified in IEEE
- 1003.1. It handles multi-volume archives and automatically determines
- the format of an archive while reading it. Three user interfaces are
- supported: tar, cpio, and pax. The pax interface was designed by IEEE
- 1003.2 as a compromise in the chronic controversy over which of tar or
- cpio is best.
-
- The USENIX Association provided some support for this implementation
- project. As a result, the Pax utility is being distributed free of
- charge and may be redistributed by others in either source or binary
- form. (See the liscensing section for restrictions)
-
- The source for Pax is being posted to comp.sources.unix on USENET and
- will also be available by anonymous FTP on the Internet from uunet.uu.net,
- moon.honeywell.com and from one of the Berkeley machines. The source
- to Pax will be available via anonymous UUCP from jhereg.mn.org, the
- author's home machine and possibly other sites.
-
- The source for Pax will continue to change as long as the definition of
- the utility is modified by the 1003.2 working group. (For example,
- there are a number of changes in Draft 8 which will be incorporated as
- soon as Draft 8 is available). Additional modifications will be made
- based on user input, such as request for support of additional archive
- formats, etc. Patches and new releases will be made as new functionality
- is added or problems are diagnosed and fixed.
-
-
- Installation
-
- In order to install Pax, you must first edit the Makefile and the
- config.h file according to the directions in each of the files.
- These two files provide the configuration information for most
- commonly available machines. Please be sure to read through all
- the directions in each of these files before attempting to compile
- Pax.
-
-
- Portability
-
- Pax is intended to run on as many systems as possible. If you have
- problems getting Pax to compile or run on your system, please let me
- know so that the source or the installation procedure can be modified.
-
- Pax has been tested and appears to run correctly on the following
- machines:
-
- Machine Operating System/Release
- -------------------------------------------------------
- Altos 586 System III (2.3)
- AT&T UNIX PC System V.2 (Release 3.51)
- Cray 2 UNICOS
- HP 9000 HP/UX 6.0.1
- Mac II A/UX 1.0
- NCR Tower System V.2
- Pyramid AT&T and Berkeley universe
- Sequent Symetry Dynix 3.0
- SGI Iris 4D/60G UNIX 3.0
- SGI Iris 4D/70G UNIX 3.0
- Sun 2 SunOS 3.4
- Sun 2 SunOS 3.5
- Sun 3 SunOS 3.4
- Sun 3 SunOS 3.5
- Sun 3 SunOS 4.0
- Sun 4 SunOS 4.0
- VAX 8750 BSD 4.3 (Mt. Xinu)
- VAX 8650 BSD 4.3 (Mt. Xinu)
- VAX 780 BSD 4.3 (Berkeley)
- -------------------------------------------------------
-
- In future releases, the source will be moving toward ANSI C and POSIX
- compatibility. This should allow for portability over any system
- supporting both ANSI and POSIX. In addition, POSIX/ANSI portability
- library routines will be developed which will allow the code to run on
- the standard machines available now.
-
-
- Credit Where Credit is Due
-
- Parts of the code which makes up Pax were gleaned from a number of
- different sources: the directory access routines in paxdir.h are
- modified copies of Doug Gwyn's dirent library; the regular expression
- matching routines in regexp.c are from Henry Spencer, some of the tar
- archive routines were initially written by John Gilmore for his PDTAR;
- and finally afio, written by Mark Brukhartz at Lachman Associates, was
- the basis for the buffering schemes used in pax.
-
-
- Licensing
-
- Copyright (c) 1989 Mark H. Colburn.
- All rights reserved.
-
- Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted
- provided that the above copyright notice is duplicated in all such
- forms and that any documentation, advertising materials, and other
- materials related to such distribution and use acknowledge that the
- software was developed by Mark H. Colburn and sponsored by The
- USENIX Association.
-
- THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR
- IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED
- WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
-
- Please report any bug or problems to:
-
- Mark Colburn
- NAPS International
- 117 Mackubin St., Suite 1
- St. Paul MN 55102
- (612) 224-9108
- mark@jhereg.MN.ORG
-