Re: GNU tar 1.13.19

[Eli Zaretskii]

[I'm not the GNU Tar maintainer, just an interested user.]

On Thu, 10 May 2001, Cesard, Patrick O. wrote:

> I'm using the GNU tar to archive a folder on a win2000 machines. However
> when I untar the file on a Unix machine I get a ^M in place of my DOS
> carriage return (CR) characters. Shouldn't GNU tar give the ability to use
> the ISO character instead of the DOS character set when creating archives on
> a windows platform? Like run the files through a dos2unix utility before
> archiving...

IMHO, it would be nice to have such an option.  However, please note that 
it is not easy to use such an option, because in a typical archive not
all files are text files.  Removing ^M characters from binary files is a 
recipe for a disaster.  Since Tar cannot easily know which files are text 
and which aren't, you need some reasonable way to make this feature 
useful and yet not dangerous.