Open System Services Porting Guide (G06.24+, H06.03+)

Table Of Contents
The Development Environment
Open System Services Porting Guide520573-006
2-9
Using Archiving Utilities
The tar Utility
The tar utility saves and restores data from traditional tar format archives. The
actions of the tar utility are controlled by one required flag and one or more optional
flags. Other arguments for the tar utility are file or directory names, specifying the files
to archive or restore. In all cases, appearance of a directory name refers to the files
and (recursively) subdirectories of that directory.
Some sample tar commands are as follows:
To archive all.c and.h files in the current directory, enter:
tar -cvf tarfile *.c *.h
To archive files in the sourcedir directory, enter:
tar -cvf tarfile sourcedir
To list archive files in the tarfile archive file, enter:
tar -tvf tarfile
To extract all files in the tarfile archive file, enter:
tar -xvf tarfile
To extract only.c and.h files from the tarfile archive file into the current directory,
enter:
tar -xvf tarfile *.c *.h
The pax Utility
The pax utility supports ustar and cpio archive formats. It reads, writes, and lists
members of an archive file, and copies files and directory hierarchies. It also supports
disk and tape media.
The pax utility runs under OSS. It creates ustar archive files by default. If cpio
archives are required, the -x cpio argument must be given. Guardian archive files in
the /G directory can also be read and written using the pax utility. Using the -f flag
overrides the default standard input or output.
The following examples demonstrate some of the major capabilities of the pax utility:
To copy the files in the current directory to magnetic tape using the /G/tape
output file:
$ pax -w -f /G/tape -b 10b .
To extract all the files from an archive file into the current directory hierarchy:
$ pax -r -f archive.pax
Files in the archive that use relative path names will be installed in the current
directory; files with absolute path names will be installed wherever their pathnames
indicate.