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-1.4.1:
- Better autoconf tests for the content of sys/mtio.h
- The Makefilesystem now creates include dependencies on
HP-UX and AIX
- Implement strange POSIX semantics for strerror() in com-
err.c
- printf() now correctly handles %X vs. %x on 64 bit ma-
chines Removed a 20 year old local extension that became
non-portable.
- star/remote.c now is 'librmt'
- librmt now may be used by any external program like e.g.
dump/restore to improve cross platform compatibility.
- librmt implements much better cross platform compatibili-
ty for MT status
- librmt now implements a non-root mode via rsh(1) instead
of rcmd(3) Note that this is much slower than a rcmd(3)
initiated
- librmt now allows to use ssh(1) for remote tape access
Note that this is even slower than with using rsh(1)
- rmt now implements the special string "PIPE" for the
hostname if called from a pipe (e.g. because ssh was
used).
- Make star -wready work on Linux (using different error
codes) too.
- Flush verbose output before calling media change script
- Check HAVE_READLINK in star
- Handle a seek error problem in create mode correctly when
checking for reading past max possible file size on non-
large file OS.
- Correctly propagate write/read errors from FIFO to star
- Add support for SIGINFO (*BSD) as a courtesy to BSD
users. We did implement ^ for intermediate status from
the mid 80s while *BSD introduced SIGINFO in 1990.
- Do not open /dev/tty is a newvolume script is present.
This allows to use star from cron scripts
- Fixed a bug in the ACL handling code on Linux that caused
star to recognize ACL comments as ACL entries and include
them in the archive
- Work around to allow star to read ACL enhanced archives
that include bogus entries that really were ACL comments
created by the bug above.
Revision history (short)
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
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 problems to saturate a
100 Mb/s network.
accurate sparse files - star is able to reproduce holes
in sparse files accurately if
the OS includes the needed sup-
port functions. This is cur-
rently true for Solaris-2.3 to
Solaris-2.5.1
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)
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.
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 im-
plementations. Star is the first tar
implementation that supports
POSIX.1-2001.
support for ACLs and file flags - star supports Access
Control Lists and extended file
flags (as found on FreeBSD and
Linux). Support to archive and restore
other file properties may easi-
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
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