Star is the fastest known implementation of a tar archiver. Main advantages over other tar implementations: fifo - Keeps the tape streaming. pattern matcher - For a convenient user interface. sophisticated diff - User tailorable interface for comparing tar archives against file trees. no namelen limitation - Pathnames of arbitrary length may be archived. deals with all 3 times - Stores/restores all 3 times of a file. does not clobber files - More recent copies on disk will not be clobbered from tape. automatic byte swap - star automatically detects swapped archives. automatic format detect - Automatically detects archive formats: old tar, gnu tar, ansi tar, star. support for ACLS and - star supports Access Control Lists as well as file flags extended file flags fully ansi compatible - star is fully ANSI/Posix 1003.1 compatible. sophisticated error - Allows to tell star which error types should be control ignored for which file name pattern true incremental - star uses the same method as dump(8)/restore(8) dump/restore features but acts OS and FS independent