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XAR(1)                                          User Commands                                         XAR(1)



NAME
       xar - eXtensible ARchiver

SYNOPSIS
       xar -[ctx][v] ...

DESCRIPTION
       The  XAR  project  aims  to  provide  an easily extensible archive format. Important design decisions
       include an easily extensible XML table of contents (TOC) for random access to archived files, storing
       the  TOC  at  the  beginning of the archive to allow for efficient handling of streamed archives, the
       ability to handle files of arbitrarily large sizes, the ability to choose independent  encodings  for
       individual  files  in  the  archive, the ability to store checksums for individual files in both com-pressed compressed
       pressed and uncompressed form, and the ability to query the table of content's rich meta-data.

FUNCTIONS
       One of the following options must be used:

       -c     Creates an archive

       -t     Lists the contents of an archive

       -x     Extracts an archive

       NOTE: all of the above require the use of the -f option (filename) as this  release  of  xar  doesn't
       correctly handle pipes or sockets.

       -f     The filename to use for creation, listing or extraction

OPTIONS
       --compression
              Specifies the compression type to use.  Valid values: none, gzip, bzip2.  Default value: gzip

       --dump-toc=<filename>
              Has xar dump the xml header into the specified file.  "-" can be specified to mean stdout.

       --dump-header
              Has xar print out the xar binary header information to stdout.

       --list-subdocs
              List the subdocuments in the xml header

       --toc-cksum
              Specifies the hashing algorithm to use for xml header verification.  Valid values: none, sha1,
              and md5.  Default value: sha1

       -l     On archival, stay on the local device.

       -P     On extract, set ownership based on uid/gid.

       -p     On extract, set ownership based on symbolic names, if possible.

       -s <filename>
              On extract, specifies the file to extract subdocuments to.  On archival, specifies an xml file
              to add as a subdocument.

       -v     Verbose output

       --exclude
              Specifies a POSIX regular expression of files to exclude from adding  to  the  archive  during
              creation  or  from  being  extracted during extraction.  This option can be specified multiple
              times.

       --rsize
              Specifies a size (in bytes) for the internal libxar read buffer while performing I/O.

       --coalesce-heap
              When multiple files in the archive are identical, only store one copy of the data in the heap.
              This creates smaller archives, but the archives created are not streamable.

       --link-same
              When the data section of multiple files are identical, hardlink them within the archive.

       --no-compress
              Specifies  a  POSIX  regular  expression  of files to archive, but not compress.  The archived
              files will be copied raw into the archive.  This can be used to exclude already gzipped  files
              from being gzipped during the archival process.

EXAMPLES
       xar -cf sample.xar /home/uid
              Create a xar archive of all files in /home/uid

       xar -tf sample.xar
              List the contents of the xar archive sample.xar

       xar -xf sample.xar
              Extract the contents of sample.xar to the current working directory

BUGS
       Doesn't currently work with pipes or streams.  Might be fixed in a future release.

       Probably   one   or   two   more   somewhere   in  there.  If  you  find  one  please  report  it  to
       http://groups.google.com/group/xar-bugs

AUTHORS
       Rob Braun <bbraun AT opendarwin DOT org>
       Landon Fuller <landonf AT opendarwin DOT org>
       David Leimbach <leimy AT opendarwin DOT org>
       Kevin Van Vechten <kevin AT opendarwin DOT org>




version 1.4                                    August 22, 2005                                        XAR(1)