edgeofassembly/star

star is a reimplementation of GNU tar, the standard command-line tool for bundling files together into a single archive file (a ".tar" file). While GNU tar is the tool that ships with most Linux systems and has been around for decades, star rebuilds the same functionality from scratch using C++23, a modern version of the C++ programming language. The goal is archive compatibility: a tar file created by star can be opened by GNU tar 1.35, and vice versa, across all the common archive formats (v7, oldgnu, gnu, ustar, and pax/posix). The command-line interface mirrors GNU tar's own, with the same short flags and long option names. You can create, extract, list, append, update, or compare archives, and compress them with gzip, bzip2, xz, or zstd. Approximately 100 options are supported. Code examples in the README show typical uses: creating a gzip-compressed archive of a directory, extracting to a specific path, stripping leading directory components, and excluding patterns like build artifacts. A verification flag re-reads the archive after creation to confirm it was written correctly. A developer might use star as a drop-in replacement for GNU tar in build pipelines, container tooling, or backup scripts where they want a well-tested, modern C++ codebase they can read and modify. Most core operations are fully implemented, a smaller set of advanced options (extended attributes, multi-volume archives, remote tape support) are accepted by the parser but do not yet have full behaviour wired up. The full README is longer than what was provided.