% Carl Parrish (cparrish@cox.net) wrote:
> Well my backup script still works. Now I just want to tar a dir for
> travel. Star is *much* faster than tar and I have star on *my* machine
> but not on the machine I'm going to be putting it on. So I was wondering
> if I'd be able to (un)tar it there. 

Got me revisiting star :).  Isn't Jörg Schilling amazing?  Wow.  Looks
like if you use the -O option when creating your archive with star it 
will 

       -O     Be  compatible  to old versions of tar.  If star is
	      invoked with this option, star  generates  archives which
	      are  fully  compatible  with  old UNIX  tar archives

Eg: 

{383} star -cO gnue/ > ~/tmp/gnue_cvs_backup.star
star: 1272 blocks + 0 bytes (total of 13025280 bytes = 12720.00k).
{384} tar tf ~/tmp/gnue_cvs_backup.star | head
gnue/
gnue/CVS/
gnue/CVS/Root
gnue/CVS/Repository
gnue/CVS/Entries
gnue/www/
gnue/www/CVS/
gnue/www/CVS/Root
gnue/www/CVS/Repository
gnue/www/CVS/Entries
Exit 141
{385} 

No errors reading archive! yay!

I've tested usingn this option with good results.  Without it causes tar
to spit out to stderr: 'tar: Skipping to next header' for each file.

tar (GNU tar) 1.13.25
Copyright (C) 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
You may redistribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public License;


star 1.4a21 (i686-pc-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 1985, 88-90, 92-96, 98, 99, 2000-2002 Jörg Schilling
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

hth,
Gontran