"tar" and metadata restore feature request

[Fields, Scott L]

Excuse me if this is a repeated question or requests, but a common issue I would like to see addressed with "tar" (and other backup commands) is the ability  to differentiate file metadata from file data.

In this case, file metadata is composed of the following:

File Permissions
File Ownership
File Timestamps

What I would LIKE to be able to do with "tar" is to restore metadata WITHOUT restoring the actual file data.

In that, for instance, I perform a "find" operation to look at files and then modify certain ones, I want to be able to change the timestamps back to their original values afterward to keep incremental backups working as they had been.

Another example is that I find that permissions are wrong, but I don't know all the files that ARE different, so I just want to restore the permissions from a backup.

To be specific, on a restore of a tar archive, I would like to be able to specify that ONLY existing files metadata of each of the explicitly specified metadata types be restored.

As a bonus, I would like to be able to a comparative restore in that "tar" will tell me files that are different from the archive in either metadata differences OR metadata differences that I would be able to specify

Last, and possibly the most difficult, I would like to be able to make a metadata ONLY archive of a list of file. This way I can keep a list of my files and their associated metadata without the space requirements AND the time to peruse the file would be much less since the actual data does not have to be read through.

Thanks.

Scott L. Fields
Senior Systems Engineer - Midrange Servers
Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway
address@hidden