 | This article possibly contains original research. (April 2021) |
| Original author(s) | Mark H. Colburn (sponsored by The USENIX Association) |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Various open-source and commercial developers |
| Initial release | 1989 |
| Written in | Colburn pax, Muller pax, Heirloom Project pax: C |
| Operating system | Unix, Unix-like, IBM i, Windows |
| Platform | Cross-platform |
| Type | Command |
| License | Colburn pax: Prior BSD License Muller pax: BSD-4-Clause Heirloom Project pax: zlib Windows: Proprietary software |
pax is an archiving utility available for various operating systems and defined since 1995.[1] 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,[2] and Microsoft Windows NT[3] until Windows 2000.
In 2001, IEEE defined a new pax format which is basically tar with additional extended attributes.[4][5] 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 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.
- ^ The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6 - POSIX.1-2001 (IEEE Std 1003.1) Copyright © 2001-2004 The IEEE and The Open Group
- ^ IBM. "IBM System i Version 7.2 Programming Qshell" (PDF). IBM. Retrieved 2020-09-05.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
Pearce1997was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ "GNU tar: 8.1 Using Less Space through Compression". www.gnu.org. Archived from the original on 6 March 2016. Retrieved 22 April 2018.
- ^ "GNU tar: 4.3.2 Extended File Attributes". www.gnu.org. Archived from the original on 28 December 2019. Retrieved 27 January 2021.