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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-1.3:
- Fixed a bug introduced a few days before releasing 1.3 that
caused star -atime not to work on Solaris.
Star now again is able to do archiving without modifying
times on Solaris if the user us root.
Revision history (short)
1982 First version on UNOS (extract only)
1985 Port to UNIX (fully funtional version)
1985 Added pre Posix method of handling special files/devices
1986 First experiments with fifo as external process.
1993 Remote tape access
1993 diff option
1994 Fifo with shared memory integrated into star
1994 Very long filenames and sparse files
1994 Gnutar and 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 ufsdump, if the
size of the filesystem is > 1 GByte.
pattern matcher - for a convenient user interface
(see manual page for more details).
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 limitation 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 doing backup
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 repairing 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 transparently reads them the right way
automatic format detect - star automatically detects several common
archive formats and adopts to them.
Supported archive types are:
Old tar, gnu tar, ansi tar, star.
fully ansi compatible - Star is fully ANSI/Posix 1003.1 compatible.
See README.otherbugs for a complete description
of bugs found in other tar implementations.
Have a look at the manual page, it is included in the distribution.
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.