Jennifer Pioch <piochjennifer at googlemail.com> wrote: > Why? AST pax is the original pax which supports more file formats than star.
AST pax is not the "original pax". The early POSIX.1-1988 drafts in 1987 did only include tar. USG (AT&T) did come up with the wish to add cpio around 1988. This created the "tar wars" that have been fought out around 1990. The winner was a program "pax" from Mark H. Colburn that implemented an interfact that nobody liked. Since then, many pax implementation have been created. AST pax is one of them. The advantage of star is that star not only implements pax but star is a archiver library that is easy to configure for new archive formats and new command line interfaces. Star implements the "star", "gnutar", "suntar", "cpio" and "pax" CLI. Star also implements many additions to do incremental backups, to archive any current and future meta data and star implements a shared memory based FIFO that significantly increases performance. Not to mention that it was star, Solaris added the lseek(f, pos, SEEK_HOLE) for to allow star to archive 100% accurate holey files. Star is developed on SunOS since February 1985 and star is well integrated to Solaris. Star includes a built in find(1), a configurable diff option, a configurable error control and many other nice features. See also http://cdrecord.berlios.de/new/private/star.html Why do you like to have a different implementaion? We only wait for the will from Sun to cooperate.....star is ready since many years. J?rg -- EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J?rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin js at cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
