On Aug 19, 2020, at 8:41 AM, Paul Gilmartin <PaulGBoulder@AIM.com> wrote:
On 2020-08-18, at 21:28:09, Guy Harris wrote:
On Aug 17, 2020, at 12:01 PM, Juergen Naeckel via wrote:
... However… First of all, a tar.gz is Linux specific.
Or, rather, UN*X specific; Linux Torvalds was about 10 years old when tar was first broadly available (with V7 in 1979, I think), and gzip came out a little more than a year after somebody announced that they were "doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones", although it did support bash and gcc when that announcement was made. :-)
".gz" is non-POSIX. z/OS UNIX doesn't supply a gzip or zip.
Non-POSIX but supplied with many UN*Xes; in practice, *not* supporting it will get in the way of using a lot of source tarballs out there - for that matter, a UN*X supplier is best advised to offer bzip2 and xzip decompression as well, these days. And does Z/OS UNIX use EBCDIC rather than ASCII? If so, it may be a UNIX, but it's a UNIX for which a lot of code written for UN*Xes may not work, although the tz code might have avoided making ASCII-specific assumptions.
And Single UNIX much prefers "pax" over "tar" nowadays.
"prefers" in what sense? And, in practice, how many pax archives using its extensions to ustar format are out there?
...offering both a tarball and a zipball might be a good idea (zip exists as a UN*X command, and ships with at least UN*Xes, but UN*X users may be less used to it).
Again, non-POSIX, but distributed with (most) Linux.
And at least some non-Linux UN*Xes: $ which unzip /usr/bin/unzip $ uname -sr Darwin 19.6.0