Comment by sureglymop

Comment by sureglymop a day ago

Wasn't there first 'ar' as a general purpose archiver and later 'tar', "tape archiver"?

Why do you find it surprising that the archive format from that time was used to archive a bunch of files?

I wasn't alive but I'm pretty sure ar wasn't only used for this purpose in unix.

electroly a day ago

> Why do you find it surprising that the archive format from that time was used to archive a bunch of files?

It's surprising because we still use it today, not because it was used at the time.

Joker_vD a day ago

Because e.g. a.out didn't survive and was replaced? Several times, even?

sureglymop 17 hours ago

That is a good point. Although I can only guess, it intuitively makes sense to me why the executable format would more quickly evolve than the archive format which "just works" still.

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