                                        December 20, 1990

I wrote bsdtar when we switched from using 4.2BSD UNIX to UNIX System V.
We had lots of tar tapes containing lots of files with names longer than
System V's archaic 14 character limit.  (Forget kernel differences -- this
file system difference has caused me more grief than all other differences
combined!)  I wrote bsdtar from the specifications in the Ugly Green Book
(IEEE Std 1003.1-1988, "IEEE Standard Portable Operating System Interface
for Computer Environments"), so AT&T has absolutely no claim to it.

For the paranoid, here's the output of "wc" and "sum -r" for the files in
the bsdtar distribution:

file              wc                    sum -r
--------        ------------------      -----------
COPYING           34    284   1803      44474     4
Makefile           9     30    251      06675     1
README            29    204   1452      -----     -
bsdtar.1          99    622   3597      34159     8
bsdtar.c        1221   4458  31017      57279    61

bsdtar has helped us quite a bit, both in retrieving our own data written
in the Good Old Days when we had a BSD system, and in reading tapes acquired
from elsewhere.  I hope it will be of use to others as well.

Stephen McConnel
Summer Institute of Linguistics  PHONE: 214-709-2418
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Road          UUCP: ...!{convex|utafll}!txsil!steve
Dallas, TX 75236              Internet: steve@txsil.lonestar.org
