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Comment on Dissecting the gzip format (2011)parent

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That's cool! Is that a GNU tar only thing? Based on it being a longopt, I'm guessing a GNU tar only thing. That's the problem with these things, it takes a while to get pushed to all the installed copies of tar running around. Perhaps it's time to check:

  * MacOS Sonoma(14.6) has tar --auto-compress and --zstd
  * OpenBSD tar does not appear to have it: https://man.openbsd.org/tar
  * FreeBSD does: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tar
Not quite fully baked yet.

Both libarchive ("bsdtar") and GNU tar have -a, which I guess are the only two upstream tar implementations that are still relevant? You're right, it can take a while for these things to propagate downstream though.

Some of us use OpenBSD: https://man.openbsd.org/tar

Ooh interesting. I'd assumed (incorrectly) that OpenBSD tar was just libarchive like FreeBSD and NetBSD. I prefer BSD libarchive tar to GNU tar as /bin/tar on my Linux machines too for what it's worth.

OpenBSD is fairly brutal on allowing third party dependencies into base. I'm sure there is a package for both libarchive and gnu tar(Haven't actually checked, but I'd be surprised if there is not).

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