A sparse extraction bug has been reported by: add@is.rice.edu (Darren Dunham) Star-1.0 will not extract sparse files correctly if in xstar format (default) please apply the patch star-1.0.patch-1 to solve this problem I found a second probblem, when extracting in non interactive mode. If a file is not writable by the owner and the extractor is not root, star will dump core. Please apply patch star-1.0.patch-2 If you use /usr/bin/patch on Solaris, cd star-1.0/star chmod +w hole.c patch