[CentOS] tar vs. star vs. something-else-I-don-t-know-about

Jim Perrin jperrin at gmail.com
Thu Nov 16 00:34:38 UTC 2006


On 11/15/06, Alexey Loukianov <aloukianov at lavtech.ru> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> today I've been sitting at work and upgrading a very-very-very old
> server with RedHat Linux 6.2 installed up to CentOS 3.8. The process
> went smoothly, as it is not the first time I was doing the things like
> this. Just after upgrading I went to rpm -qai list and got an
> interesting observation: there are at least two "tar" utilities installed
> on the system.
>
> One is tar, and second is star.

Tar is the one you'll likely run into the most. Star is similar to
tar, but has ACL support, so if you're using extended ACL support
(requires a mount option to the file system) you get to keep all the
fine grained permissions. This applies to about 1% of the user
population*.

* This statistic was yanked directly from the southern orifice and
should not in any way be considered accurate

Mostly, learn tar first as it is what nearly everything uses and expects.


-- 
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
George Orwell



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