[Bug-tar] Not exactly a bug, but....

[Don Gingrich]

with v1.21(on an open SuSE 11.2 system since they may have
modified it)  I have noticed that the f- form for either read from stdin
or write to stdout is no longer available. This is a long-standing part of
the tar interface, and a bit of a PITB to lose. I've been working
with *nix systems for a longish time and have always used the following to
copy filesystems:

tar cpvf- * | ( cd /mnt ; tar xpf- )

with the new partition mounted at /mnt

GNU tar has always been better at this since it did not have
the broken restrictions on subdirectory depth that SysV tar
had.

I could argue, that the default for *nix programs is to take
input from stdin, in the absence of an input file, and to send
output to stdout in the absence of an output file, but I suspect
that my argument would be falling on deaf ears.

This happened previously a few years ago, but AFAIK, the 
original syntax was restored.

Of course, if you could point me to the right general place in the
source, I believe that this is likely to be within my "fixing" ability.

Thanks,

-Don
-- 
Don Gingrich
address@hidden       School of CSIT, RMIT Melbourne, Au
address@hidden           address@hidden
http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~gingrich for gpg public key