tar or gtar

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2005-07-12 07:48, "Sherman, Michael (GE Energy)" <michael.sherman at og.ge.com> wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> I am running 5.3. I noticed that by default the BSD tar is used. Are
> there any advantages of gtar over tar? If so which ones?

The most important advantage is that it is BSD licensed.

> Also which compression switch is more efficient -z or -Z ?

Hmmm, I'm not sitting on FreeBSD, but looking at the manpage I can only
see -y (bzip2 compression) and -z (gzip compression); I couldn't find an
option called -Z.  The relative merits or disadvantages of gzip
vs. bzip2 compression are described in a couple of short comparisons
I did a while back, so you may want to read these:

http://keramida.serverhive.com/weblog/archives/2005-05-17/bzip2-seems-slightly-better-than-gzip-for-email-compression
http://keramida.serverhive.com/weblog/archives/2005-05-19/gzip-vs-bzip2-on-large-files