tar -l versus gtar -l

[Tim Kientzle]

David G. Lawrence wrote:
> 
>    Well...the SUSv2 specification for tar may not have been the best standard
> to adhere to. The change of behavior for the 'l' option on create is going
> to seriously bite a lot of people because it majorly affects what is
> archived.

I'm reluctant to contradict the one serious
attempt to standardize tar simply because gtar
ignored that effort.

I would rather just disable the -l option entirely;
that way, people would get an error message instead
of having the tar program behave unexpectedly.

Would you be happier with this behavior?

   $ tar -cl /foo
   Error: -l is ambiguous
     If you want GNU tar -l, use --one-file-system instead.
     If you want POSIX tar -l, use --link-warn instead.

Tim