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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!news.netspace.net.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.Hawaii.Edu!news.caldera.com!news.eli.net!uunet!in1.uu.net!160.45.4.4!fu-berlin.de!cs.tu-berlin.de!js From: js@cs.tu-berlin.de (Joerg Schilling) Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.unix.misc,alt.os.linux,alt.sys.sun,bln.comp.sun,bln.comp.unix,comp.os.linux.development.apps,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.sys.hp.apps,comp.sys.hp.misc,comp.sys.sgi.admin,comp.sys.sgi.apps,comp.sys.sgi.misc,comp.sys.sun.admin,comp.sys.sun.apps,comp.sys.sun.misc,comp.unix.aix,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.solaris,de.comp.os.linux.misc,de.comp.os.unix,linux.dev.admin,linux.dev.apps,maus.os.linux,maus.os.linux68k,maus.os.unix,uk.comp.os.linux Subject: STAR (tape archiver) source code released Date: 30 Apr 1997 10:57:06 GMT Organization: Technical University of Berlin, Germany Lines: 108 Distribution: inet Message-ID: <5k78i2$fht$1@news.cs.tu-berlin.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: 130.149.25.72 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Summary: Star is a fast and Posix compliant tape archiver Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.admin:57542 comp.unix.misc:29041 alt.os.linux:20710 alt.sys.sun:11011 comp.os.linux.development.apps:32517 comp.os.linux.misc:172775 comp.sys.hp.apps:6817 comp.sys.hp.misc:11233 comp.sys.sgi.admin:46008 comp.sys.sgi.apps:14655 comp.sys.sgi.misc:30303 comp.sys.sun.admin:86045 comp.sys.sun.apps:15307 comp.sys.sun.misc:29517 comp.unix.aix:98941 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:40018 comp.unix.solaris:105077 de.comp.os.unix:409 Star, the fastest tar archiver for UNIX is now available in source. 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 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 Solaris Linux HP-UX DG/UX IRIX AIX FreeBSD 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. This is the first source release of star that I put on the net. 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. -- EMail: joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin js@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) If you don't have iso-8859-1 jes@fokus.gmd.de (work) chars my name is URL: http://www.fokus.gmd.de/usr/schilling J"org Schilling