paxtar is an implementation of an archiving utility that reads
and writes several formats - traditional ones, the extended
formats specified in IEEE 1003.1, and the ar(5) format used
by deb(5) packages (MirBSD specific paxtar extension). The
pax interface was designed by IEEE 1003.2 as a compromise in
the chronic controversy over which of tar or cpio is best, but
this implementation offers paxcpio and paxtar for easy calling.
.
This is the MirBSD paxtar implementation supporting the formats
ar, bcpio, cpio, SVR4 cpio with and without CRC, old tar, and
ustar, but not the format known as pax yet. It has extensions
for removing non-numerical user and group IDs from the archive,
storing hardlinked files only once, setting ownership to the
superuser, anonymising inode and device information, changing
the mtime to zero, and producing GNU tar compatible trailing
slashes on ustar directory nodes. Its "ar" format is suitable
for operating on *.deb files, unlike that of GNU binutils.
.
Note that ACLs and Extended Attributes are not supported.
