The tar utility in 10.4 is great in that it now supports copying of resource forks. I've used hfstar for a long while, and thought I'd switch this weekend to using the 10.4 version on a newly-acquired Intel iMac. The machine has its internal disk partitioned into three pieces: OS, Users and Media. On the OS and Media partitions, /usr/bin/tar worked fine and preserved resource forks on the backups.
On the Users partition, however, it successfully created tar archives, but without resource forks being preserved. It also generated errors of the form:
$ tar -cvf test.tar Test
Test/
tar: /tmp/tar.md.GPzLI9: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
Test/.DS_Store
tar: /tmp/tar.md.ayDXd5: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
Test/MyCD
Test/test.tar
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
I did some googling on the issue, and could find very little other than some mention that it might be due to disk errors. So I ran a repair with Disk Utility, and it couldn't find anything wrong with the disk.
So I then cloned the Users partition, re-formatted, and re-cloned back, and tar started working fine again. It was only after all this effort that I realized that I'd previously enabled ACL on the Users volume to share an iPhoto library in /Volumes/Users/Shared. (This process is described in a previous hint.)
As a test, I enabled ACL with:
sudo /usr/sbin/fsaclctl -p /Volumes/Users -e
When I did so, the tar errors returned. I then switched ACL off with:
sudo /usr/sbin/fsaclctl -p /Volumes/Users -d
With ACL disabled on the volume, the tar errors disappeared again.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2006102912402560