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

Jan Claeys lists at janc.be
Thu May 17 23:53:23 UTC 2007


Op donderdag 17-05-2007 om 15:18 uur [tijdzone -0700], schreef 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. 

I think GUI archive tools should ask or backup before overwriting by
default, but changing the behaviour of command line tools might cause
problems.


-- 
Jan Claeys





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