was recently asked if i could teach a course to prepare some folks to write the RHCSA (red hat certified sys admin) exam, so i was reviewing the official list of what they would need to know here: https://www.redhat.com/en/services/training/ex200-red-hat-certified-system-administrator-rhcsa-exam and i was intrigued by this line: "Archive, compress, unpack, and uncompress files using tar, star, gzip, and bzip2" "star"? it's been a while since i saw a reference to that -- the man page is here: https://linux.die.net/man/1/star and one of the selling points of star is its ability to archive ACL information. but there are certainly other ways to archive ACL information. regular "tar" these days seems to be ACL-aware: Extended file attributes --acls Enable POSIX ACLs support. "rsync" also handles ACLs and extended attributes: -A, --acls preserve ACLs (implies -p) -X, --xattrs preserve extended attributes and one of the popular recommendations is to save ACL info separately from archiving since one expects it to change much less frequently than file content, so one can use getfacl and setfacl: $ getfacl -R . > permissions.facl $ setfacl --restore=permissions.facl given all of this, does anyone here use "star" for regular archiving? it seems that star is superfluous given other solutions, but i'm willing to be corrected. rday