Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Personally, I thought Tar was completely obsolete now?

  Why would it be obsolete? What would you suggest as an alternative?
It's still widely used in the unix world.

> Specifically, I found a TAR.EXE, but it instantly crashes because it 
> can't find "cygwin.dll". And, almost unbelievably, I can't find anywhere 
> on the face of the Internet where I can download this file - including 
> the Cygwin website!

  I really can't understand why precisely cygwin is used to port unix
programs to Windows. Cygwin binaries rely on a bunch of dlls nobody has.

  mingw, on the other hand, is a cross-compiler which creates native
Windows binaries (both command-line and GUI'd) which do not require any
dll which a basic standard Windows installation wouldn't have.

  (The "cross-compiler" part means that you can, for example, compile a
Windows binary directly from linux. You don't even need Windows to be
in your computer at all.)

  Yes, mingw does not have all the posix and unix libraries that cygwin
has, but a pretty wide range of applications can be compiled with it
directly. I have never tried, but I assume tar could well be one of those.
(OTOH file stats might present a problem if mingw doesn't support them.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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