Re: Perfomance problem backupscript (more details and tests)

On Tue, 2005-08-30 at 09:28, Joerg Schilling wrote:

> And it should be noted that this is badly documented (no man page)
> and that the workaround is not mentioned at all:
> 
> use GNU tar -c > /dev/zero

For the pathological cases where I've wanted gnutar to read
data, then discard it, I've used  "-f - |cat >/dev/null".

> It is really bad practice to introduce such an implicit and hidden
> feature into a program. Star does it the clean, obvious and easy
> to controllable way: use star -onull if you only like to do 
> specfic tests for size metering.

On the other hand it is useless, even if good practice, to arbitrarily
change options so that interoperation with other existing tools
like amanda cannot work.  Star might now have sufficient
awareness of incrementals to replace gnutar for amanda runs, but
guess which I'm still using...   Are there any higher-level programs
like amanda, backuppc, etc. that work with star?

> Note that GNU tar is even buggy in it's "amanda feature" and badly
> fails if you use this "feature" together with sparse files.

Does it report the space as shown by ls -l, or what will be used
in the modes that understand sparse files?

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    [email protected]