laris,de.comp.os.linux.misc,de.comp.os.unix,linux.dev.admin,lin-
ux.dev.apps,maus.os.linux,maus.os.lin-
ux68k,maus.os.unix,uk.comp.os.linux Subject: Star-1.3 source has
been released
Star is the fastest tar archiver for UNIX
Star has many improvements compared to other tar imlementations
(including gnu tar). See below for a short description of the
highlight of star.
Star is located on:
ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/star
Changes since star-1.2:
- star -c now don't uses STDIO This speeds things
up (15% on Solaris 50% on Linux due to the bad STDIO im-
plementation on Linux)
Star now usually needs significant less user CPU time
than GNU tar.
On Intel processors star uses about the same CPU time
than GNU tar. This is because star uses structured code
which is punished by the Intel Processor implementation.
Star is now at least 30% faster than ufsdump
- Experimental -Hxustar option to create xstar archives
without the extra 'tar' signature at the end of the tar
header. This makes the xstar format 100% POSIX compliant
too.
- Compat code for old tar option behaviour. Allows
all but to use "tar -cf file" on an existent file. tar
-cf file remains valid if "file" does not exist or is empty.
This keeps the star behaviour not to clobber files on
miss typed command lines and gives old tar compatibility.
- star now realises if the tar archive is too small and not
a multiple of 512 bytes.
- Converted to the new makefile system that uses autoconf.
- -u/-r options enabled
- -diff now checks for sparse files too. Note that
this will give probems if the file is located on a buggy
HP-UX NFS file server.
- Added code to use the _FIOAI ioctl on Solaris to speed up
archiving sparse files > 200 times. You need a
hacked ufs filesystem in order to use this on So-
laris 2.6 ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/ker-
nel/ufs
- Workaround for a bug in Sun's tar on Solaris that creates
illegal null terminated filenames (if the filename is
exactly 100 chars long).
- Fixed a problem with autoconf & SCO for major()...
- Check VOLHDR on extract
- New option -bz to call bzip2 as compress program.
- added O_BINARY to allow star to work corectly on Cygwin32
- Avoid seekdir() in Cygwin32
- New option -refresh-old-files to prevent star from creat-
ing new files while extracting an archive.
- Don't strip leading '/' from targets of symlinks
- Star now knows that that DOS filesystems increment the
time stamp of a file only in 2 second steps.
This is needed to make the skipping of older files on ex-
traction work correctly.
- Correctly skip a file on tape if the filename is longer
than the OS can handle.
- Always make the path tables at least 1024 bytes even when
the actual OS does not allow that much. This helps to
read archives from other OS.
- Workaround for the Cygwin bug that causes maxfilename to
be longer than maxpathname.
- Workaround for Cygwin bug that return ENOTEMPTY for
rmdir() if the arg does not refer to a directory.
*********** We need to check this if Cygwin-1.x
hast been corrected ***********
- Workaround for the fact that Cygwin32 does not allow us
to set the file access times for read only files.
- Print warning for unknown archive types.
- Knowledge base for
- New option -refresh as alias to -refresh-old-files
- New option -hpdev allows 24 bits in dev_minor using 8 oc-
tal digits. Note that although it allows to ctreate tar
archives that can be read with HP-UX tar, this creates
tar archives which violate POSIX.
- New option -modebits allows to create tar archives that
include more than 12 bits from st_mode. Note this create
tar archives that violate POSIX but some tar implementa-
tions insist in reading such nonstandard archives....
- New option -copylinks allows to copy hard/symlinks tar-
gets rather than creating a link. This helps to extract
tar files on systems that do not implement links (e.g.
OS/2).
- Print a message for EFBIG on the archive
- Suppress the sync pipe read error messages when another
error message is already printed and the sync pipe read
error is only a result of this other error.
- set the time of a file to 0 (1. Jan 1970) if an error oc-
curs. This allows to use another runf of star to over-
write this file whithout having to specify the -U flag.
- Use fsync() to force file consistence on NFS filesystems.
- Allow 7 octal numbers in 8 Byte fields in POSIX mode.
This gives 21 bits in minor device numbers.
- New base 256 coding allows 63 bits in minor device num-
bers. This coding has been negotiated with the new gnu-
tar maintainer. Warning, this is not yet 100%
stable code but it allows to archive device files on
FreeBSD.
- Use mkfifo() if present
- Add remove_file support to more than plain files only.
- Added FIFO suport for OS/2
- Better portability support
- Automated de-configuration of the FIFO on platforms
that do not support shared memory
- Fix for a buffer overflow problem with remote tape ac-
cess.
- Man page created for rmt.
- align_test.c removed from lib/
- avoffset.c removed from lib/
- several functions now use js_snprintf() instead of
sprintf()
- star now supports to open remote files with O_CREATE
if the remote tape sever (/etc/rmt) is the Schily rmt
sever or the GNU rmt server
- Format strings of printf-like functions checked and cor-
rected.
- FIFO now should work on OS/2 too
- Fixed a autoconf typo in star_unix.c that dis-
abled _FIOSATIME and thus star -c -atime ... did modify
ctime when trying to reset atime after reading a file.
- Fixed a typo in mt.c (active if no default tape defini-
tion exists)
- Allow mt.c to compile on systems that have no sys/mtio.h
e.g. SCO
- mt.c will now compile on HP-UX
- support for win98-2 & win2000 & Win ME
- star list= ... will now skip empty lines (llen == 0)
- Support for dev_t > 32 bits (e.g. Solaris in 64 bit mode)
- Support for Apollo Domain/OS (e.g. mmap() specials)
- Support for MacOS X (Darwin)
- Support for GCC on IRIX
- New option -onull as alias for -nullout to make star be-
have similar to sdd
- Made all options that include a '_' obolete and replaced
'_' by '-' in the option names.
- Long Listing now prints a 'l' for files with mandatory
record locking
Ustar(Posix) handling added 1994 Xstar format (extended Posix)
defined and introduced 1995 Ported to many platforms
Supported platforms:
SunOS 4.x, Solaris (SunOS 5.x), Linux, HP-UX, DG/UX, IRIX, AIX,
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OSF-1, True-64, BeOS, Apollo Domain/OS,
Next-STep, OS/2, SCO-openserver, SCO-unixware, Cygwin (Win32),
Sony NewsOS, BSDi (BSD/OS), QNX, Apple Rhapsody, MacOS X
Joerg
-------------------------------------------------------------
Star is the fastest known implementation of a tar archiver. Star
is able to make backups with more than 12MB/s if the disk and
tape drive support such a speed. This is more than double the
speed that ufsdump will get. Ampex got 13.5 MB/s with their new
DLT tape drive. Ufsdump got a maximum speed of about 6MB/s with
the same hardware.
Star development started 1982, development is still in progress.
The current version of star is stable and I never did my backups
with other tools than star.
Its main advantages over other tar implementations are:
fifo - keeps the tape streaming.
This gives you faster backups
than you can achieve with ufs-
dump, if the size of the
filesystem is > 1 GByte.
pattern matcher - for a convenient user interface
(see manual page for more de-
tails). To archive/extract a
subset of files.
sophisticated diff - user tailorable interface for
comparing tar archives against
file trees This is one of the
most interesting parts of the
star implementation.
no namelen limitation - Pathnames up to 1024 Bytes may
be archived. (The same limita-
tion applies to linknames) This
limit may be expanded in future
without changing the method to record long names.
deals with all 3 times - stores/restores all 3 times of
a file (even creation time)
may reset access time after do-
ently reads them the right way
automatic format detect - star automatically detects sev-
eral common archive formats and
adopts to them. Supported ar-
chive types are: Old tar, gnu
tar, ansi tar, star.
fully ansi compatible - Star is fully ANSI/Posix 1003.1
compatible. See README.other-
bugs for a complete description
of bugs found in other tar implementations.
Have a look at the manual page, it is included in the distribu-
tion.
Author:
Joerg Schilling Seestr. 110 D-13353 Berlin Germany
Email: joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de, js@cs.tu-berlin.de
schilling@fokus.gmd.de
Please mail bugs and suggestions to me.
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