On Mon, Feb 18, 2002 at 08:17:58AM -0600, Dan Drake wrote: > Whose bright idea was it to have `j' be the option for handling bzipped > tarballs? And whose not-very-bright-at-all idea was it to *change* that > to `y'? My Debian unstable system has "j tar", the math department has > "y tar". It drives me nuts! You forgot I. A number of people favor explicitly piping between tar and bzip2 simply to avoid the j/y/I issue. > It seems like it wouldn't be difficult to extend the `z' option to > handle bzip2 archives, by simply looking at the file's extensions. Or > looking at the first bytes of the file and recognizing the binary > formats. For decoding/extracting, that makes good sense. For encoding/ creating an archive, it would be arguably the Wrong Thing. z = gzip, not bzip2. > It doesn't seem like it would be hard to do. Why hasn't anybody > done that yet? a) Tradition b) Backwards-compatibility c) Symmetry d) All of the above -- When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists have already won. - reverius Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss