SCO 2.2.1 tar question

[John F. Haugh II]

> In article <8WQW5Ky00Vs8MSNUQN at andrew.cmu.edu> jl42+ at andrew.cmu.edu (Jay Mathew Libove) writes:
> | Hi. I'm running SCO Xenix SysV/286 v2.2.1 on an IBM PC/AT clone and
> | I am having a bit of a problem with "tar".
> | I want to tar off a filesystem as:
> | 
> | % tar cf - /pathname | compress | tar cfk /dev/rfd096ds9 720 -
> | 
> | but when I do this I get:
> | 
> | tar: blocksize must be a multiple of 2.

this must be an april's fools day joke of some kind.  the person (jay libove)
who posted the original article has made too many mistakes for this to be
simple stupidity.

first off, last time i checked there was no 96 tpi 9 sector device.  the
only 96 tpi device was 15 sectored.

secondly, you have two tar's with the 'c' option in the pipe line.  'c'
stands for 'create archive', so the input of the second tar is coming from
the files requested to be archived.  the /dev/rfd096ds9 [sic] device is
going to be the output device, not standard output as requested with the
'-' option.

thirdly, assuming jay meant to use 'x' on the second tar, which is the
only way for two tars in a pipe to work, the input would have been coming
from compress, which is not in tar format.  you are lucky you only received
a blocksize message.

i suppose the correct response now would be `RTFM'.

- john.
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