tar
Facility
For a description of the ‐f function modifier, see the tar
(1) man page.
If the TAPE
environment variable is not present and the value of one of the arguments is a number and ‐f is not specified, the number matching the archiveN string is looked up in the /etc/default/tar
file. The value of the archiveN string is used as the output device with the blocking and size specifications from the file.
For example:
% tar -c 2 /tmp/*
This command writes the output to the device specified as archive2
in the /etc/default/tar
file.