Star is the fastest known implementation of a tar archiver. This is the development version of star. 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 up to 1024 Bytes 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. fully ansi compatible - star is fully ANSI/Posix 1003.1 compatible.