This is a public domain tar(1) replacement.  It implements the 'c',
'x', and 't' commands of Unix tar, and many of the options.  It creates
P1003 "Unix Standard" [draft 6] tapes by default, and can read and
write both old and new formats.  It can compress or decompress tar
archives "on the fly" (using the 'z' option) as well as accessing
remote tape drives by specifying "host:/dev/tapedrive".  It lets you
set the default tape drive by setting TAPE in your environment.  Its
verbose output looks more like "ls -l" than the Unix tar, and even
lines up the columns.  It is a little better at reading damaged tapes
than Unix tar.  There is a half-baked "diff" option for comparing a
tape against the file system.

It is designed to be a lot more efficient than the standard Unix tar;
it does as little bcopy-ing as possible, and does file I/O in large
blocks.  On the other hand, it has not been timed or performance-tuned;
it's just *designed* to be faster.

On the Sun, the tar archives it creates under the 'old' option are
byte-for-byte the same as those created by /bin/tar, except the trash
at the end of each file and at the end of the archive has been replaced
by zeroes.

It was written and initially debugged on a Sun Workstation running
4.2BSD.  It has been run on Xenix, Unisoft, Vax 4.2BSD, V7, USG,
Masscomp, and Minix systems.  I'm interested in finding people who will
port it to other types of (Unix and non-Unix) systems, use it, and send
back the changes; and people who will add the obscure tar options that
they happen to use and I don't.  In particular, VMS, MSDOS, Mac, Atari
and Amiga versions would be handy.

It still has a number of loose ends, marked by "FIXME" comments in the
source.  Fixes to these things are also welcome.

I am the author of all the code in this program.  I hereby place it in
the public domain.  If you modify it, or port it to another system,
please send me back a copy, so I can keep a master source.

This program is better than it started due to the effort and care put
in by Henry Spencer, Fred Fish, Ian Darwin, Geoff Collyer, Stan Barber,
Guy Harris, Dave Brower, and Richard Todd.  Thank you, one and all.

	John Gilmore
	Nebula Consultants
	PO Box 170608
	San Francisco, California, USA  94117-0608
	hoptoad!gnu
	Hoptoad talks to sun, ptsfa, ihnp4, utzoo, ucsfcgl.

@(#)README 1.9	87/07/07

[Contributed July 27, 1987 to the Sun User Group tape by:
  
	John Gilmore
	Nebula Consultants
	PO Box 170608
	San Francisco, CA  94117
	hoptoad!gnu
 
The program is in the public domain.]
