Re: untar.m on Solaris with non-GNU tar

[Bill Denney]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> You don't really need varargin for a function like this.  It might be
> clearer to write
>   
Whatever style you prefer.
> Also, it looks like we are always asking unpack to get and return the
> file list, even if it is not requested.  Should we maybe make it so
> that step is avoided if we don't want it (omit the -v options in the
> commands used by unpack and the output parsing if nargout is zero)?
>   
I don't see a straightforward way to keep the command list persistent 
and to omit the -v options.  If you prefer not getting the output when 
it's not requested, then it seems that the persistence must go (or 
things would have to get much more spaghetti-like).
> Also, we could use mfilename to get the last arg for unpack.  Then all
> these functions could be identical except for the function names.
>
>   function varargout = bunzip2 (files, outputdir)
>     if (nargin == 1 || nargin == 2)
>       if (nargin == 1)
>         outputdir = ".";
>       endif
>       varargout = cell (1, nargout);
>       [varargout{:}] = unpack (files, outputdir, mfilename ());
>     else
>       print_usage ();
>     endif
>   endfunction
>   
That does make more sense.
> Hmm, don't see a way to push any of this duplication into the unpack
> function given its current definition, but if print_usage accepted an
> argument, then I suppose we could write
> [functions that call another intermediate function]
> OTOH, maybe that is going too far.
>   
I can see a use for doing it like that, but I don't expect that we'll 
have too many more of these decompression functions (the only things 
that are missing off the top of my head are rar, arj, and 7zip, and I 
don't really expect to need those, personally), so I think that 7 more 
lines of code in about 5 files isn't too bad.

Bill