Lesson plan
Pax (command)
pax is an archiving utility available for various operating systems and defined since 1995. Rather than sort out the incompatible options that have crept up between tar and cpio , along with their implementations across various versions of Unix, the IEEE designed a new archive utility, pax, that could support various archive formats with useful options from both archivers. The pax command is available on Unix and Unix-like operating systems and on IBM i, and Microsoft Windows NT until Windows 2000. In 2001, IEEE defined a new pax format which was essentially tar with additional extended attributes. The format is not supported by pax commands in most Linux distributions and in FreeBSD, but it is supported by tar commands from GNU and FreeBSD; the format is further supported by pax commands in OpenBSD, AIX, Solaris and HP-UX. The name "pax" is an acronym for portable archive exchange, but is also an allusion to the Latin word for "peace"; the command invocation and structure represents somewhat of a peaceful unification of both tar and cpio .
Article summary
pax is an archiving utility available for various operating systems and defined since 1995. Rather than sort out the incompatible options that have crept up between tar and cpio , along with their implementations across various versions of Unix, the IEEE designed a new archive utility, pax, that could support various archive formats with useful options from both archivers. The pax command is available on Unix and Unix-like operating systems and on IBM i, and Microsoft Windows NT until Windows 2000. In 2001, IEEE defined a new pax format which was essentially tar with additional extended attributes. The format is not supported by pax commands in most Linux distributions and in FreeBSD, but it is supported by tar commands from GNU and FreeBSD; the format is further supported by pax commands in OpenBSD, AIX, Solaris and HP-UX. The name "pax" is an acronym for portable archive exchange, but is also an allusion to the Latin word for "peace"; the command invocation and structure represents somewhat of a peaceful unification of both tar and cpio .
Key claims
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.