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by killercup 2348 days ago
Tar was released in '79 iirc, so it's about the same age.
1 comments
boutad 2348 days ago
I imagine most modern users of tar are using GNU Tar or libarchive bsdtar. Are there any current tar implementations that can be directly traced to the original?
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kjs3 2348 days ago
The BSD's tar is derived from the old 4BSD tar which was derived from the original.

Pretty sure SCO Unix (yes, you can still buy it) is System V tar. Probably Solaris, too.

I recall AIX tar is...something else, none of the above. I don't recall the details.

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boutad 2348 days ago
According to the man page for bsdtar that ships with Ubuntu

A tar command appeared in Seventh Edition Unix, which was released in January, 1979. There have been numerous other implementations, many of which extended the file format. John Gilmore's pdtar public-domain implementation (circa November, 1987) was quite influential, and formed the basis of GNU tar. GNU tar was included as the standard system tar in FreeBSD beginning with FreeBSD 1.0. This is a complete re-implementation based on the libarchive(3) library. It was first released with FreeBSD 5.4 in May, 2005.

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kjs3 2347 days ago
Ah...my bad. OpenBSD tar has Berkeley copyrights. Looks like Free/NetBSD don't. I made a bad assumption there. Thanks.
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