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pax (Unix) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
pax is an archiving utility created by POSIX and defined by the POSIX.1-2001[1] standard. By default, it creates archives in ustar format, also defined by the POSIX standard. 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 a new archive utility. The name "pax" is an acronym for portable archive exchange. Furthermore, "pax" means "peace" in Latin, so name implies it shall create peace between the tar and cpio format supporters. The command invocation and command structure, is somewhat a unification of both, tar and cpio.
The interesting bit is at the bottom: it's required by the LSB,but only 6.36% of Debian systems have it installed. However, it comes by default on OSX, where it's used internally in the .pkg format.
There's a push to distribute Python in pax format, and supposedly Red Hat and others plan to move to it. Shaving even 10% off an enormous bandwidth bill would make sense. (Although of course, it seems unlikely the old formats are going to go away any time soon.)
