Pax (command)

The pax command is available on Unix and Unix-like operating systems and on IBM i, and Microsoft Windows NT until Windows 2000. In 2001, IEEE defined a new pax format which was essentially 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 OpenBSD, AIX, Solaris and HP-UX. The name "pax" is an acronym for portable archive exchange, but is also an allusion to the Latin word for "peace"; the command invocation and structure represents somewhat of a peaceful unification of both tar and cpio. The first public implementation of pax was written by Mark H. Colburn in 1989. Colburn posted it to comp.sources.unix as Usenix/IEEE POSIX replacement for TAR and CPIO. Manual pages for pax on HP-UX, IRIX, and SCO UNIX attribute pax to Colburn. As early as POSIX.2 draft 10 from July 1990 covers pax command.