XAR 1.3 Released

2005.10.25

I'm pleased to announce the availability of xar 1.3.

xar is a new archiver, with a library and new archive format. xar is designed to preserve the plethora of metadata associated with files in modern operating systems, including Extended Attributes and ACLs on Mac OS X 10.4, Linux, and FreeBSD. Additionally, it can preserve resource forks and finder metadata on Mac OS X 10.3.

xar 1.3 has some major bugfixes for bugs introduced in 1.2.

Bug Fixes:

• Error handling is improved, specifically around when reads fail.
• Default read size is 4096 instead of 8192, since some linux pseudo filesystems only work if a read of size 4096 is returned. This setting can be changed with the --rsize option.
• Fixed an inconsistency with DT_SONAME while building.
• Fixed a problem with the order of extraction of attributes that would manifest its self as some attributes not being extracted.
• Fixed some typeos in the usage statement.
• When a fata error is returned from libxar, xar(1) really stops processing.

Features:

• --coalesce-heap option added which finds identical heap items and only stores one copy of them, updating the offsets to point to the single item. This option will break streaming, but produce smaller archives.
• --link-same option added which findsd identical data sections and represents the identical files as hardlinks of each other.
• --rsize option added, which specifies the amount of data read per read() system call.
• If a heap element would be zero length, it is not archived at all.
• -t implies -v now.
• --no-compress option added which takes a regular expression of files not to compress.

Please see the web page for more details.

Rob Braun