RFC: alias tar="tar --backup" ?

[Micah Cowan]

A user, timothy, describing his difficulties at:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/113154

describes his frustration as a new user, in discovering the hard way
that tar's default is to overwrite existing files, causing him to lose
important data.

While I'm opposed to fixing the problem in tar itself, as traditional
usage frequently relies upon this behavior, I don't see why we couldn't
make the experience of using tar interactively a little safer, by
providing a default alias for tar in /etc/skel/.bashrc that backs-up
existing files.

Comments?

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer...
http://micah.cowan.name/


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