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tar Archives More Portable
Creating a tar archive on a particular system, meant to be later
useful on many other machines and with other versions of tar,
is more a challenge than you might think. tar archive formats
evolved since the first versions of Unix, many such formats are flying
around, not always comptabile between them. This section wants to
discuss a few problems, and give some advice, for making tar
archives more portable.
One golden rule is simplicity. For example, limit your tar
archives to contain only regular files and directories, avoiding
other kind of special files. Do not attempt to save sparse files or
contiguous files as such. Let's discuss a few more problems, in turn.
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