Gregory's Server@april yeah this really reveals my age. back in 2004 I was actually working with tape servers, and mostly occupied with spotting differences between BSD tar and GNU tar.
so I completely missed all of this. in fact, I just made a mental note that other day to start using -a but not even that is necessary anymore.
@stemid
@april Newbie.
I was doing that back in 1997: piping tar through cpio to tape. We didn't have tape libaries, though; had to swap them by hand.
Though on the topic of differences, a colleague did once get '-v' and '-w' backwards for grep, and killed all processes _except_ the one he was aiming for, on the company database server...