Hi Paul Robert Marino!

 On 2013.07.24 at 20:49:18 -0400, Paul Robert Marino wrote next:

> Admittedly my knowledge about modern versions of GNU tar may be out of date. My
> experiences with older versions oder the last 18 years was it didn't support
> those things. Glad to hear its been updated :-) I will be eager to read the man
> files tomorrow so I can update some old scripts I wrote a long time ago.

The support appeared in mainline tar only recently (about 2 years ago in
1.26), but UV has been patching tar that goes with EL distributions to
support this for quite a time (at least since RHEL5 release,
http://magazine.redhat.com/2007/07/02/tips-from-an-rhce-tar-vs-star-the-battle-of-xattrs/)
In SL6 it's still just tar 1.23 but it fully supports it.

So yes, go ahead and use it! It should be supported on about every
system by now.

-- 

Vladimir