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.berlios.de/pub/star
Changes since star-1.4.2:
- Support for BSDi version 4.x
- Suport for BSDi on sparc
- Support for sparc64 FreeBSD
- Support for i786-cygwin
- Added +DAportable to the HP-UX cc compiler flags
- New Platform 9000-831-hp-ux-cc
- Added floatingpint printing support for OS/2
- Added support for macppc-netbsd-cc NetBSD on MAC
- Workaround for an OpenBSD bug in ctype.h (illegaly #de-
fines EOF)
- Added IPv6 support to 'rmt'
- Better casting for debug printf() in 'rmt'
- Better autoconfiguration for librmt and its users yields
in better compilation and portability results for OS that
do not support the needed internet features for remote
tape support.
- Fixed a bug that caused star to create broken archives if
the POSIX.1-2001 extended format is used for sparse files
> 8 GB. For this reason, a new extended header tag SCHI-
LY.realsize has been added.
- Fixed a bug that caused star to dump core on UNIX-98 TAR
compat mode with e.g. 'star cbv' because star did not
check for the missing arg to the -b option.
- 'star -n -tpath ...' now only prints the pathnames to al-
low to use the ooutput directly in scripts. If you like
the old behavior, use 'star -nv ...'
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
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.
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)
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-
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
Email: schilling@fokus.fhg.de, js@cs.tu-berlin.de jo-
erg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de
Please mail bugs and suggestions to me.
Man(1) output converted with
man2html