Linda A. Walsh wrote:
Would it be possible to get tar to copy (or ignore) file attributes, and to copy ACL's if they exist ( maybe via an option)?
There's been a little work on this over the last few years. The native tar programs for Solaris and AIX provide some of this, but obviously only for their particular platforms. As far as I know, Joerg Schilling's "star" was one of the first to provide this using the extension mechanism of the standard "pax extended" format. Joerg did a pretty good job; bsdtar and GNU tar have each implemented some of this compatibly with "star." Unfortunately, the "star" extensions only support POSIX.1e-style ACLs which are quite a bit different from the Windows-style ACLs (also called "NTFS" or "NFS4" ACLs). I know Joerg was working to extend it to support NTFS/NFS4 ACLs but haven't heard whether he ever finished that. That said, Joerg's work to support POSIX.1e ACLs is well worth studying. In particular, Joerg worked out one important issue that both the Solaris and AIX implementations got wrong: Joerg included both names and numeric IDs for every account referenced in an ACL. A lot of people are interested in this, but it's a matter of someone sufficiently knowledgeable about the issues actually doing the work. I've done some research and written up some of my findings to help anyone who would like to tackle this: http://code.google.com/p/libarchive/wiki/TarNFS4ACLs Cheers, Tim Kientzle
