tar suggestions

[David Haigh]

Having worked mostly with SGI's version of tar, I think there are 
a couple of improvements that could be made to GNU tar. 

I'll start with what I think everyone will think are improvements 
and then move on to a debatable matter.

First suggestion:
Unlike GNU tar, the SGI does not automatically strip the leading 
/ from an absolute path in a tar file. However what they did to
get around this limitation was to add an R option which extracts 
the tar file relative to the users current directory. Also, this 
version of tar can use RR to extract symbolic links. If you use
RRR it extracts all files to the current directory ignoring the 
directory structure entirely. This last behavior is very useful!

Many times I get a file from someone, and I don't really care to
duplicate any of their directory structure on my system so I'll 
create a new directory and extract all the files to it using RRR.

I think a lot of users would like this ability with GNU tar.

Second suggestion: (For debate)
I'd like to see an option to allow the extraction of the absolute 
path in a tar file. I like that GNU tar defaults to extracting a 
relative path, however there are times I would really like the 
ability to extract the full path.
-- 
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| David A. Haigh                                                  | 
| Alcatel USA                                                     | 
| 1400 McDowell Blvd, Petaluma, CA 94954                          | 
| phone:  (707)7927-007   <--- Yes double "O" seven!              | 
| fax:    (707)792-7059                                           | 
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