On 28 May 2009, at 20:23, Pim Zandbergen wrote:

... I was trying to make a backup of /var/spool/caldavd, preserving the extended attributes, when discovering that Ubuntu's tar does not have a -- xattr switch.

The same version of tar on my Fedora boxes do support that. Is that a Fedora extension, or an Ubuntu omission? What do Ubuntu people use to backup files with extended attributes?

If you run `tar --version` you'll probably find both machines are running GNU tar. I suspect that GNU tar supports extended attributes at source, but enabling it may be optional at compile time and that Ubuntu have chosen not to enable it when they built the package. Ubuntu may have a separate tar-xattr package that contains an enabled-binary, or you may be able to obtain one from a different source. Worst case is that you'll have to compile it yourself (download the gzipped tar from <http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/

, untar it, then uninstall Ubuntu's tar using synaptic or whatever).

Suggest you search the notoriously helpful Ubuntu forums for "tar extended attributes xattr" and see what others suggest. Stroller.