Star is a tar like archiver - TAR stands for Tape ARchiver.


Star saves many files together into a single tape or disk archive,
and can restore individual files from the archive. It includes a FIFO
for speed, a pattern matcher, multivolume support, the ability to archive
sparse files, automatic archive format detection, automatic byte order
recognition, automatic archive compression/decompression, remote archives
and special features that allow star to be used for full backups.
It also includes `rmt', a truly portable version of the remote tape server
that supports remote operation between different OS and machine architectures
(hides even Linux oddities) and a portable `mt' tape drive control program
that is able to use the remote tape interface.

The RMT program if 100% compatible with Sun's extensions for inter-platform
operability support (MT status codes) and with GNU extensions for inter-platform
open() interoperability. In addition, it includes my enhancements that
hide Linux MT-ioctl non compliances with other UNIX platforms.

Star is the fastest known implementation of a tar archiver.
Star is even faster than ufsdump in nearly all cases.

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.

	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" or "bzip2", star
				  automatically activates decompression.

	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.
