Clustering many options, the last of which
has an argument, is a rather opaque way to write options. Some wonder if
GNU getopt should not even be made helpful enough for considering
such usages as invalid.
Beware that if you precede options with a dash, you are announcing the short option style instead of the old option style; short options are decoded differently.
Before GNU
tar version 1.11.6, a bug prevented intermixing old style options
with mnemonic options in some cases.
There
are plans to merge the cpio and tar packages into a single one
which would be called paxutils. So, who knows if, one of this days,
the --version would not yield `tar (GNU paxutils) 3.2'
This is well described in Unix-haters Handbook, by Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise & Steven Strassmann, IDG Books, ISBN 1-56884-203-1.
Well! We should say
the whole truth, here. When --sparse (-S) is selected while creating
an archive, the current tar algorithm requires sparse files to be
read twice, not once. We hope to develop a new archive format for saving
sparse files in which one pass will be sufficient.
Previous versions
of tar used full regular expression matching, or before that, only
exact string matching, instead of wildcard matchers. We decided for the
sake of simplicity to use a uniform matching device through tar.
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