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PAX - Portable Archive Interchange

Copyright (C) 1989 Mark H. Colburn
All Rights Reserved.


Introduction

    This is version 1.1 of Pax, a public domain archiving utility.  
    
    Pax is an archiving utility that reads and writes tar and cpio formats, 
    both the traditional ones and the extended formats specified in IEEE 
    1003.1.  It handles multi-volume archives and automatically determines 
    the format of an archive while reading it.  Three user interfaces are 
    supported: tar, cpio, and pax.  The pax interface was designed by IEEE 
    1003.2 as a compromise in the chronic controversy over which of tar or 
    cpio is best.

    The USENIX Association provided some support for this implementation 
    project.  As a result, the Pax utility is being distributed free of 
    charge and may be redistributed by others in either source or binary 
    form.  (See the liscensing section for restrictions)

    The source for Pax is being posted to comp.sources.unix on USENET and 
    will also be available by anonymous FTP on the Internet from uunet.uu.net,
    moon.honeywell.com and from one of the Berkeley machines.  The source
    to Pax will be available via anonymous UUCP from jhereg.mn.org, the 
    author's home machine and possibly other sites.

    The source for Pax will continue to change as long as the definition of 
    the utility is modified by the 1003.2 working group.  (For example, 
    there are a number of changes in Draft 8 which will be incorporated as 
    soon as Draft 8 is available).  Additional modifications will be made 
    based on user input, such as request for support of additional archive 
    formats, etc.  Patches and new releases will be made as new functionality 
    is added or problems are diagnosed and fixed.


Installation

    In order to install Pax, you must first edit the Makefile and the 
    config.h file according to the directions in each of the files.  
    These two files provide the configuration information for most 
    commonly available machines.  Please be sure to read through all 
    the directions in each of these files before attempting to compile
    Pax.


Portability

    Pax is intended to run on as many systems as possible.  If you have
    problems getting Pax to compile or run on your system, please let me 
    know so that the source or the installation procedure can be modified.

    Pax has been tested and appears to run correctly on the following 
    machines:

        Machine                 Operating System/Release
	-------------------------------------------------------
	Altos 586		System III (2.3)
	AT&T UNIX PC		System V.2 (Release 3.51)
	Cray 2			UNICOS
	HP 9000			HP/UX 6.0.1
	Mac II 			A/UX 1.0
	NCR Tower		System V.2
	Pyramid			AT&T and Berkeley universe
	Sequent Symetry		Dynix 3.0
	SGI Iris 4D/60G		UNIX 3.0
	SGI Iris 4D/70G		UNIX 3.0
	Sun 2			SunOS 3.4
	Sun 2			SunOS 3.5
	Sun 3			SunOS 3.4
	Sun 3			SunOS 3.5
	Sun 3			SunOS 4.0
	Sun 4			SunOS 4.0
	VAX 8750		BSD 4.3 (Mt. Xinu)
	VAX 8650		BSD 4.3 (Mt. Xinu)
	VAX 780			BSD 4.3 (Berkeley)
	-------------------------------------------------------

    In future releases, the source will be moving toward ANSI C and POSIX 
    compatibility.  This should allow for portability over any system 
    supporting both ANSI and POSIX.  In addition, POSIX/ANSI portability 
    library routines will be developed which will allow the code to run on 
    the standard machines available now.


Credit Where Credit is Due

    Parts of the code which makes up Pax were gleaned from a number of 
    different sources: the directory access routines in paxdir.h are 
    modified copies of Doug Gwyn's dirent library; the regular expression 
    matching routines in regexp.c are from Henry Spencer, some of the tar 
    archive routines were initially written by John Gilmore for his PDTAR; 
    and finally afio, written by Mark Brukhartz at Lachman Associates, was 
    the basis for the buffering schemes used in pax.


Licensing

    Copyright (c) 1989 Mark H. Colburn.  
    All rights reserved.

    Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted
    provided that the above copyright notice is duplicated in all such 
    forms and that any documentation, advertising materials, and other 
    materials related to such distribution and use acknowledge that the 
    software was developed by Mark H. Colburn and sponsored by The 
    USENIX Association. 

    THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR
    IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED
    WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Please report any bug or problems to:

Mark Colburn
NAPS International
117 Mackubin St., Suite 1
St. Paul MN   55102
(612) 224-9108
[email protected]

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