Hear how to pronounce "ess-star"...
2012 we celebrate an anniversary: In August 30 2012, star turned 30.
star project on SourceForge.
The latest stable release is here, but always first check schilytools above.
star manpages
star archive format manpage
Hints for ACL backup with star
Hints on TAR archive portability from Michal Górny
The star mailinglists
Warning: star-1.5a28 and later may create 'global' POSIX.1-2001 extended headers.
star-1.5a25 and earlier have a bug and will go into an endless loop if you try to
read archives with global extended headers.
Star development started in 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:
built-in "find"
star is built on top of libfind and thus allows you to execute
"find" like expressions in create, extract and list mode.
This allows to do a lot of interesting things that could not be
done if star and find would be called separatedly.
fifo
keeps the tape streaming. This gives you at least 30% faster backups than
you can achieve with ufsdump.
remote tape support
a fast RMT implementation that has no probems to saturate a 100 Mb/s network
in the mid 1990s and today is even much faster.
selectable cli
star cli=xxx allows to select a command line interface from the list
star, suntar, gnutar, pax, cpio.
accurate sparse files
star is able to reproduce holes in sparse files accurately if the OS includes
the needed support functions. This is currently true for Solaris-2.3 to
Solaris-2.5.1 and for Solaris-10 or newer
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
Before July 2018, star did archive and extract Pathnames up to 1024 Bytes.
Since July 2018, star deals with long names of arbitrary length. The same
limitation applies to linknames.
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 after doing backup. On Solaris this can be done without
changing 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 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,
POSIX.1-2001 PAX, Sun's Solaris tar, cpio.
automatic compression detect
star automatically detects whether the archive is compressed. If it has been compressed
with a compression program that is compatible to decompression with "gzip", "bzip2",
"lzop", "p7zip", "xz", "zstd", ..., star automatically activates decompression for.
14 different compression types.
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. Star is the first tar implementation that
supports POSIX.1-2001.
support for ACLs and file flags
star supports Access Control Lists with the withdrawn POSIX method and the NFSv4
standard ACL method as well as extended file flags (as found on FreeBSD
and Linux). Support to archive and restore other file properties may easily added.
support for all inode metadata
star supports to put all inode metadata on the archive. This allows
star to perform true incremental dumps.
sophisticated error control
allows to tell star which error types
should be ignored for wich file name pattern.
This allows to write backup scripts that give
no error messages for all problems that
are tolerable (e.g. growing log files).
'ed' like pattern substitutuions
star supports automated pattern rule based file name substitution as documented for 'pax'.
fast built in -copy mode
allows to make fast and accurate copies and directory tree comparisons.
star supports automated pattern rule based file name substitution as documented for 'pax'.
True incremental dump/restore features
star is the first TAR based backup system
that has been verified to handle typical file system changes correctly.
Star uses the same method as ufsdump/ufsrestore but acts OS and FS indeependent.
My testscripts for POSIX tar compliance.
The zwicky test a backup testsuite from Elizabeth D. Zwicky.
The Backup torture test documentation from Elizabeth D. Zwicky.
The Zwicky web page is available here. It's a backup made by archive.org on June 22, 2001, as the original web page is no longer available.
Schily's Homepage
