pax (command)
pax is an archiving utility available for various operating systems and defined since 1995. 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 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, and Microsoft Windows NT until Windows 2000.
| 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 |
In 2001, IEEE defined a new pax format which is basically tar with additional extended attributes. 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. The command invocation and structure is somewhat a unification of both tar and cpio.