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Besides cdrecord, he created several other high quality tools. I especially remember star, a tar with features that made it much better suitable for real-world tape backups than GNU tar. A friend used it to implement a backup system.

I think people in the German nerdsphere had an affection for him because he was a fanatical fan of Solaris, which he liked to get into in all kinds of situations, notably in heated comments on heise.de. It was kind of cute to see such an obviously intelligent guy behave like that. Many geeks and nerds have things that they care much more about than would be considered "normal", after all.



Do you know why those features never got adopted into GNU tar?


Perhaps not on the surface. GNU tar, for instance, to this day uses the pax header fields introduced by star for storing extended attributes.


I don't. But I think it was something about splitting an archive over multiple tapes and / or modifying such archives.




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