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-1.4 source has
been released
*************** Please have a look at the German open Source Cen-
ter BerliOS at www.berlios.de BerliOS will continue to support
free hosting of cryptography projects even when US laws change
and don't allow to host cryptography projects in the USA. Also
look at sourcewell.berlios.de, the first Open Source announcement
service that itself is implemented as Open Source project.
***************
Star is the fastest tar archiver for UNIX
Star has many improvements compared to other tar implementations
(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-1.4:
- Fixed a bug introduced by applying a patch from 8.3.2002
from Andreas Gruenbacher <ag@bestbits.at>
The bug caused a needed ',' to be ommited from the ACL
string in extract mode if the target platform did not
have named entries in the passwd file and the ACL string
was converted to use the numeric user id instead.
- Fixed a bug that caused star to complain
"star: Cannot handle multi volume archives
from/to stdin/stdout."
if called "star -c f=- ..." or "star cf - ...".
- Better OS/2 compatibility
- Fixed a minor bug that caused star not to behave correct-
ly if the POSIX filename prefix is exactly 155 chars and
the reserved field in the tar header that directly fol-
lows the prefix did contain non null characters.
- Do not emmit base 256 charcaters for archive formats that
do not understand base 256
- New program "tartest" reads TAR archives from "stdin" and
1982 First version on UNOS (extract only) 1985 Port to UNIX
(fully functional version) 1985 Added pre Posix method of han-
dling special files/devices 1986 First experiments with fifo
as external process. 1993 Remote tape access 1993 diff op-
tion 1994 Fifo with shared memory integrated into star
1994 Very long filenames and sparse files 1994 Gnutar and
Ustar(Posix.1-1988) handling added 1994 Xstar format (extended
Posix.1-1988) defined and introduced 1995 Ported to many plat-
forms 1999 Support for Win32 (Cygwin) 1999 base 256 support
to overcome limitation with octal fields 2001 Large file sup-
port 2001 Support for POSIX.1-2001 extended headers
2001 Support for ACLs in POSIX.1-2001 extended headers
2002 Support for extended file flags in POSIX.1-2001 extended
headers 2002 Support for extended inode meta data and meta
files
Supported platforms:
Virtually any! Known to work:
SunOS 4.x, Solaris (SunOS 5.x), Linux, HP-UX, DG/UX, IRIX, AIX,
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OSF-1, True-64, QNX, BeOS, Apollo Do-
main/OS, Next-STep, OS/2, SCO-openserver, SCO-unixware, Caldera
OpenUnix, Cygwin (Win32), Sony NewsOS, BSDi (BSD/OS), QNX, Apple
Rhapsody, MacOS X, AmigaOS, GNU Hurd
Joerg
-------------------------------------------------------------
Star is the fastest known implementation of a tar archiver. Star
is able to make backups with far more than 10MB/s if the disk and
tape drive support such a speed. This is more than double the
speed that ufsdump will get. In 1996, Ampex got 13.5 MB/s with
their DLT tape drive which is a modified professional digital
video tape drive and not related to Quantum's DLT type drives.
Ufsdump got a maximum speed of about 6MB/s with the same hard-
ware.
Star development started 1982, the first complete implementation
has been done in 1985. 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.
remote tape support - a fast RMT implementation that
has no probems to saturate a
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)
With POSIX.1-2001 the times are
in nanosecond granularity.
Star may reset access time af-
ter doing backup. On Solaris
this can be done without chang-
ing the ctime.
does not clobber files - more recent copies on disk will
not be clobbered from tape
This may be the main advantage
over other tar implementations.
This allows automatically re-
pairing of corruptions after a
crash & fsck (Check for differences
after doing this with the diff
option).
automatic byte swap - star automatically detects
swapped archives and transpar-
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,
POSIX.1-2001 PAX, Sun's Solaris tar.
automatic compression detect - star automatically detects
whether the archive is com-
pressed. If it has been com-
pressed with a compression program that
is compatible to decompression
with "gzip" or "bzip2", star
automatically activates decom-
pression.
ly added.
support for all inode metadata - star supports to put all
inode metadata on the archive.
This allows future versions of
star to perform true incremen-
tal dumps.
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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