Mailing-List: contact cygwin-developers-help AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com; run by ezmlm Sender: cygwin-developers-owner AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin-developers AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 18:25:29 +0200 (MET DST) From: Joerg Schilling Message-Id: <199907131625.SAA21535@fokus.gmd.de> To: cygwin-developers AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com Subject: Star Source ready for Cygwin32 Hi, Cdrecord / Mkisofs / Cdda2wav are available for compilation on Cygwin32 for some time. ( see ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/cdrecord/alpha ) Now I finally got the time to make the star source ready for Cygwin too. Get ftp://ftp.gokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/star/alpha/star-1.3a5.tar.gz Changes since star-1.3a5: - added O_BINARY to allow star to work corectly on Cygwin32 - Avoid seekdir() in Cygwin32 - New option -refresh_old_files to prevent star from creating new files while extracting an archive. - Don't strip leading '/' from targets of symlinks - Star now knows that that DOS filesystems increment the time stamp of a file only in 2 second steps. This is needed to make the skipping of older files on extraction work correctly. - Correctly skip a file on tape if the filename is longer than the OS can handle. - Always make the path tables at least 1024 bytes even when the actual OS does not allow that much. This helps to read archives from other OS. - Workaround for the Cygwin bug that causes maxfilename to be longer than maxpathname. - Workaround for Cygwin bug that return ENOTEMPTY for rmdir() if the arg does not refer to a directory. - Workaround for the fact that Cygwin32 does not allow us to set the file access times for read only files. - Print warning for unknown archive types. - Knowledge base for Packed, Gzip compressed, LZW compressed, Freezed, SCO LZH compressed and bzip2 compressed magic numbers gives hints for correct usage of -z or -bz options. Tell user about the compression program that will help to unpack the archive. - Star offeres full FIFO and remote tape access support even on Cygwin32. 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 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 AT schily DOT isdn DOT cs DOT tu-berlin DOT de, js AT cs DOT tu-berlin DOT de schilling AT fokus DOT gmd DOT de Please mail bugs and suggestions to me. Jörg EMail:joerg AT schily DOT isdn DOT cs DOT tu-berlin DOT de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin js AT cs DOT tu-berlin DOT de (uni) If you don't have iso-8859-1 schilling AT fokus DOT gmd DOT de (work) chars I am J"org Schilling URL: http://www.fokus.gmd.de/usr/schilling ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix