	--- README File for Remote TAR ---

This program has been put together by:

	Luigi Rizzo
	Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Univ. di Pisa
	via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (ITALY)
	email: luigi@iet.unipi.it
	tel: +39-50-568533	fax: +39-50-568511


This is a modified version of GNU TAR, running on MSDOS and able to
access the Unix file system via "rsh". The network support is a
modified version of WATTCP libraries (originally created by Erick
Engelke, Univ. of Waterloo, CA, ee@development.uwaterloo.ca) which
compiles under MS-C 6.00 and MASM 5.0.

I have included the full sources for TAR, plus my version of the WATTCP
library. The modified WATTCP sources will be available shortly (mainly
because of the lack of documentation!).

You can use this program as a normal tar, with standard options. If you
want to read/write to a Unix file (or device), you can specify the
target file (the one after the -f option) as follows:

	host:user:password:target_file
	
(the password can be omitted, in which case it will be requested at run
time; an empty password must be specified as a minus sign, '-').

The remote host is accessed via rexec to execute

	"cat - >target_file"	(when writing)

or

	"cat target_file"	(when reading)
	
so that tar can access the actual archive. The "-z" option will execute
compress or zcat on the remote system, so that you end up with a
compressed archive. As an additional option, you can specify the 
"-r" flag on the command line so that the target_file is interpreted as
the command to be executed on the remote system. Thus, the following are
equivalent:

	tar zcvf host:user:password:file.tar	.

	tar rcvf "host:user:password: compress - > file.tar.Z" .


The tar executing on the DOS machine will read from / write to the
output/input of the command running on Unix.

The whole thing might still have bugs, and it has not been thoroughly
tested (take it as an 'alpha' version). If you find a bug or a fix,
please send me a note.

DISCLAIMER about possible bugs
==============================

I wrote this program by merging an old version of GNU TAR, some
routines to do directory searches (msd_dir), Erick Engelke's version of
rsh and my version of WATTCP libraries. Thus I have not a complete
knowledge of all of the sources.  Nevertheless, I've done some backups
and the program appears to work reasonably well.  Among possible
problems are the following:

- Compilation has only been tried in SMALL model. I suspect the msd_dir
  routines have problems in large model.

- I'm not quite sure on how wildcard in filenames are handled (but
  useful things like "tar tvf file.tar ." do work).

- There might be problems with stack overflows with deep directory trees.
================================


(Here follows the original README coming with the GNU TAR I used)
===========================================================

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 decompress tar archives when
reading them from disk files (using the 'z' option), but cannot do so
when writing, or when reading from a tape drive.  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.

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.

It was written and initially debugged on a Sun Workstation running
4.2BSD.  It has been run on Xenix, Unisoft, Vax 4.2BSD, V7, and USG
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.  For example, it does not chown() extracted files.  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.

	John Gilmore
	Nebula Consultants
	1504 Golden Gate Ave.
	San Francisco, California, USA  94115
	+1 415 931 4667		voice
	hoptoad!gnu		data
	jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa	data
Hoptoad talks to sun, ptsfa, well, lll-crg, ihnp4, cbosgd, ucsfcgl, pyramid.

@(#)README 1.5	86/10/29
