1 GNU tar NEWS - User visible changes. 2021-01-07
2 Please send GNU tar bug reports to <bug-tar@gnu.org>
4 version 1.33 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2021-01-07
6 * POSIX extended format headers do not include PID by default
8 The intent is to make binary-equivalent PAX archives easy to create. If
9 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, the POSIX standard default is used, which embeds
12 * --delay-directory-restore works for archives with reversed member ordering
14 * Fix extraction of a symbolic link hardlinked to another symbolic link
16 * Wildcards in exclude-vcs-ignore mode don't match slash
18 * Fix the --no-overwrite-dir option
20 Given this option, previous versions of tar failed to preserve
21 permissions of empty directories and to create files under directories
22 owned by the current user that did not have the S_IWUSR bit set.
24 * Fix handling of chained renames in incremental backups
26 * Link counting works for file names supplied with -T
28 * Accept only position-sensitive (file-selection) options in file list files.
30 Using such options as -f, -z, etc. is senseless in a file list file and
31 bypasses option consistency checks in decode_options. Therefore,
32 only options related to file selection (a.k.a position-sensitive options)
33 are allowed in file list files.
36 version 1.32 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2019-02-23
38 * Fix the use of --checkpoint without explicit --checkpoint-action
40 * Fix extraction with the -U option
42 See http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-tar/2019-01/msg00015.html,
45 * Fix iconv usage on BSD-based systems
47 * Fix possible NULL dereference (savannah bug #55369)
49 * Improve the testsuite
52 version 1.31 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2019-01-02
54 * Fix heap-buffer-overrun with --one-top-level.
55 Bug introduced with the addition of that option in 1.28.
57 * Support for zstd compression
59 New option '--zstd' instructs tar to use zstd as compression program.
60 When listing, extractng and comparing, zstd compressed archives are
61 recognized automatically.
62 When '-a' option is in effect, zstd compression is selected if the
63 destination archive name ends in '.zst' or '.tzst'.
65 * The -K option interacts properly with member names given in the command line
67 Names of members to extract can be specified along with the "-K NAME"
68 option. In this case, tar will extract NAME and those of named members
69 that appear in the archive after it, which is consistent with the
70 semantics of the option.
72 Previous versions of tar extracted NAME, those of named members that
73 appeared before it, and everything after it.
77 When creating archives with the --sparse option, previous versions of
78 tar would loop endlessly if a sparse file had been truncated while
82 version 1.30 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2017-12-17
84 * Member names containing '..' components are now skipped when extracting.
86 This fixes tar's behavior to match its documentation, and is a bit
87 safer when extracting untrusted archives over old files (an unsafe
88 practice that the tar manual has long recommended against).
90 * Report erroneous use of position-sensitive options.
92 During archive creation or update, tar keeps track of positional
93 options (see the manual, subsection 3.4.4 "Position-Sensitive
94 Options"), and reports those that had no effect. For example, when
97 tar -cf a.tar . --exclude '*.o'
99 tar will create the archive, but will exit with status 2, having
100 issued the following error message
102 tar: The following options were used after non-optional
103 arguments in archive create or update mode. These options are
104 positional and affect only arguments that follow them. Please,
105 rearrange them properly.
106 tar: --exclude '*.o' has no effect
107 tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
109 * --numeric-owner now affects private headers too.
111 This helps the output of 'tar' to be more deterministic.
113 * Fixed the --delay-directory-restore option
115 In some cases tar would restore the directory permissions too early,
116 causing subsequent link extractions in that directory to fail.
118 * The --warnings=failed-read option
120 This new warning control option suppresses warning messages about
121 unreadable files and directories. It has effect only if used together
122 with the --ignore-failed-read option.
124 * The --warnings=none option now suppresses all warnings
126 This includes warnings about unreadable files produced when
127 --ignore-failed-read is in effect. To output these, use
128 --warnings=none --warnings=no-failed-read.
130 * Fix reporting of hardlink mismatches during compare
132 Tar reported incorrect target file name in the 'Not linked to'
136 version 1.29 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2016-05-16
138 * New options: --verbatim-files-from, --no-verbatim-files-from
140 The --verbatim-files-from option instructs tar to treat each line read
141 from a file list as a file name, even if it starts with a dash.
143 File lists are supplied with the --files-from (-T) option. By
144 default, each line read from a file list is first stripped off the
145 leading and trailing whitespace and, if the result begins with a dash,
146 it is treated as tar command line option.
148 Use the --verbatim-files-from option to disable this special handling.
149 This facilitates the use of tar with file lists created automatically
150 (e.g. by find(1) command).
152 This option affects all --files-from options that occur after it in
153 the command line. Its effect is reverted by the
154 --no-verbatim-files-from option.
156 * --null option reads file names verbatim
158 The --null option implies --verbatim-files-from. I.e. each line
159 read from null-delimited file lists is treated as a file name.
161 This restores the documented behavior, which was broken in version
164 * New options: --owner-map=FILE and --group-map=FILE
166 These two options provide fine-grained control over what user/group
167 names (or IDs) should be mapped when adding files to archive.
169 For both options, FILE is a plain text file with user or group
170 mappings. Empty lines are ignored. Comments are introduced with
171 # sign (unless quoted) and extend to the end of the corresponding
172 line. Each non-empty line defines translation for a single UID (GID).
173 It must consist of two fields, delimited by any amount of whitespace:
175 OLDNAME NEWNAME[:NEWID]
177 OLDNAME is either a valid user (group) name or a ID prefixed with +. Unless
178 NEWID is supplied, NEWNAME must also be either a valid name or a
179 +ID. Otherwise, both NEWNAME and NEWID need not be listed in the
180 system user database.
182 * New option --clamp-mtime
184 The new --clamp-mtime option changes the behavior of --mtime to only
185 use the time specified if the file mtime is newer than the given time.
186 The --clamp-mtime option can only be used together with --mtime.
188 Typical use case is to make builds reproducible: to loose less
189 information, it's better to keep the original date of an archive,
190 except for files modified during the build process. In that case, using
191 reference (and thus reproducible) timestamps for the latter is good
194 See <https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds> for more information.
196 * Deprecated --preserve option removed
198 * Sparse file detection
200 Tar now uses SEEK_DATA/SEEK_HOLE on systems that support it. This
201 allows for considerable speed-up in sparse-file detection.
203 New option --hole-detection is provided, that allows the user to
204 select the algorithm used for hole detection. Available arguments
207 --hole-detection=seek
208 Use lseek(2) SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE "whence" parameters.
211 Scan entire file before storing it to determine where holes
214 The default is to use "seek" whenever possible, and fall back to
218 version 1.28, 2014-07-28
220 * New checkpoint action: totals
222 The --checkpoint-action=totals option instructs tar to output the
223 total number of bytes transferred at each checkpoint.
225 * Extended checkpoint format specification.
227 New conversion specifiers are implemented. Some of them take
228 optional arguments, supplied in curly braces between the percent
229 sign and the specifier letter.
231 %d - Number of seconds since tar started.
232 %{r,w,d}T - I/O totals; optional arguments supply prefixes
233 to be used before number of bytes read, written and
234 deleted, correspondingly.
235 %{FMT}t - Current local time using FMT as strftime(3) format.
236 If {FMT} is omitted, use %c.
237 %{N}* - Pad output with spaces to the Nth column, or to the
238 current screen width, if {N} is not given.
239 %c - A shortcut for "%{%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S}t: %ds, %{read,wrote}T%*\r"
241 * New option --one-top-level
243 The option --one-top-level tells tar to extract all files into a
244 subdirectory named by the base name of the archive (minus standard
245 compression suffixes recognizable by --auto-compress). When used with
246 an argument, as in --one-top-level=DIR, the files are extracted into the
247 supplied DIRectory. This ensures that no archive members are
248 extracted outside of the specified directory, even if the archive is
249 crafted so as to put them elsewhere.
253 The --sort=ORDER option instructs tar to sort directory entries
254 according to ORDER. It takes effect when creating archives.
255 Available ORDERs are: none (the default), name and inode. The
256 latter may be absent, if the underlying system does not provide
257 the necessary information.
259 Using --sort=name ensures the member ordering in the created archive
260 is uniform and reproducible. Using --sort=inode reduces the number
261 of disk seeks made when creating the archive and thus can considerably
262 speed up archivation.
264 * New exclusion options
266 --exclude-ignore=FILE Before dumping a directory check if it
267 contains FILE, and if so read exclude
268 patterns for this directory from FILE.
269 --exclude-ignore-recursive=FILE
270 Same as above, but the exclusion patterns
271 read from FILE remain in effect for any
272 subdirectory, recursively.
273 --exclude-vcs-ignores Read exclude tags from VCS ignore files,
274 where such files exist. Supported VCS's
275 are: CVS, Git, Bazaar, Mercurial.
278 * Tar refuses to read input from and write output to a tty device.
282 This release includes official tar(1) and rmt(8) manpages.
283 Distribution maintainers are kindly asked to use these instead of the
284 home-made pages they have been providing so far.
287 version 1.27.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2013-11-17
291 * Fix unquoting of file names obtained via the -T option.
293 * Fix GNU long link header timestamp (backward compatibility).
295 * Fix extracting sparse members from star archives.
298 version 1.27 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2013-10-05
302 ** Sparse files with large data
304 When creating a PAX-format archive, tar no longer arbitrarily restricts
305 the size of the representation of a sparse file to be less than 8 GiB.
309 In the default C locale, diagnostics and output of 'tar' have been
310 adjusted to quote 'like this' (with apostrophes) instead of `like this'
311 (with an accent grave character and an apostrophe). This tracks
312 recent changes to the GNU coding standards.
314 * --owner and --group names and numbers
316 The --owner and --group options now accept operands of the form
317 NAME:NUM, so that you can specify both symbolic name and numeric ID
318 for owner and group. In these options, NAME no longer needs to be
319 present in the current host's user and group databases.
321 * The --keep-old-files and --skip-old-files options.
323 This release restores the traditional functionality of the
324 --keep-old-files. This option causes tar to avoid replacing
325 existing files while extracting and to treat such files as errors.
326 Tar will emit a prominent error message upon encountering such files
327 and will exit with code 2 when finished extracting the archive.
329 A new option --skip-old-files is introduced, which acts exactly as
330 --keep-old-files, except that it does not treat existing files as
331 errors. Instead it just silently skips them. An additional level of
332 verbosity can be obtained by using the option --warning=existing-file
333 together with this option.
335 * Support for POSIX ACLs, extended attributes and SELinux context.
337 Starting with this version tar is able to store, extract and list
338 extended file attributes, POSIX.1e ACLs and SELinux context. This is
339 controlled by the command line options --xattrs, --acls and --selinux,
340 correspondingly. Each of these options has a `--no-' counterpart
341 (e.g. --no-xattrs), which disables the corresponding feature.
342 Additionally, the options --xattrs-include and --xattrs-exclude allow
343 you to selectively control for which files to store (or extract) the
346 * Passing command line arguments to external commands.
348 Any option taking a command name as its argument now accepts a full
349 command line as well. Thus, it is now possible to pass additional
350 arguments to invoked programs. The affected options are:
352 --checkpoint-action=exec
353 -I, --use-compress-program
357 Furthermore, if any additional information is supplied to such a
358 command via environment variables, these variables can now be used in
359 the command line itself. Care should be taken to escape them, to
360 prevent from being expanded too early, for example:
362 tar -x -f a.tar --info-script='changevol $TAR_ARCHIVE $TAR_VOLUME'
364 * New configure option --enable-gcc-warnings, intended for debugging.
366 * New warning control option --warning=[no-]record-size
368 On extraction, this option controls whether to display actual record
369 size, if it differs from the default.
371 * New command line option --keep-directory-symlink
373 By default, if trying to extract a directory from the archive,
374 tar discovers that the corresponding file name already exists and is a
375 symbolic link, it first unlinks the entry, and then extracts the directory.
377 This option disables this behavior and instructs tar to follow
378 symlinks to directories when extracting from the archive.
380 It is mainly intended to provide compatibility with the Slackware
381 installation scripts.
384 version 1.26 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2011-03-12
388 ** Fix the --verify option, which broke in version 1.24.
390 ** Fix storing long sparse file names in PAX archives.
392 ** Fix correctness of --atime-preserve=replace
394 tar --atime-preserve=replace no longer tries to restore atime of
397 ** Work around POSIX incompatibilities on FreeBSD, NetBSD and Tru64
399 ** Fix bug with --one-file-system --listed-incremental
401 When invoked with these two options, tar 1.25 would add only the
402 top-level directory to the archive, but not its contents.
405 version 1.25 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-11-07
407 * Fix extraction of empty directories with the -C option in effect.
408 * Fix extraction of device nodes.
409 * Make sure name matching occurs before eventual name transformation.
411 Tar 1.24 changed the ordering of name matching and name transformation
412 so that the former saw already transformed file names. This made it
413 impossible to match file names in certain cases. It is fixed now.
415 * Fix the behavior of tar -x --overwrite on hosts lacking O_NOFOLLOW.
417 * Improve the testsuite.
419 * Alternative decompression programs.
421 If extraction from a compressed archive fails because the corresponding
422 compression program is not installed and the following two conditions
423 are met, tar retries extraction using an alternative decompressor:
425 1. Another compression program supported by tar is able to handle this
427 2. The compression program was not explicitly requested in the command
428 line by the use of such options as -z, -j, etc.
430 For example, if 'compress' is not available, tar will try 'gzip'.
433 version 1.24 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-10-24
435 * The --full-time option.
437 New command line option '--full-time' instructs tar to output file
438 time stamps to the full resolution.
442 ** More reliable directory traversal when creating archives
444 Tar now checks for inconsistencies caused when a file system is
445 modified while tar is creating an archive. In the new approach, tar
446 maintains a cache of file descriptors to directories, so it uses more
447 file descriptors than before, but it adjusts to system limits on
448 the number of file descriptors. Tar also takes more care when
449 a file system is modified while tar is extracting from an archive.
451 The new checks are implemented via the openat and related calls
452 standardized by POSIX.1-2008. On an older system where these calls do
453 not exist or do not return useful results, tar emulates the calls at
454 some cost in efficiency and reliability.
456 ** Symbolic link attributes
458 When extracting symbolic links, tar now restores attributes such as
459 last-modified time and link permissions, if the operating system
460 supports this. For example, recent versions of the Linux kernel
461 support setting times on symlinks, and some BSD kernels also support
464 ** --dereference consistency
466 The --dereference (-h) option now applies to files that are copied
467 into or out of archives, independently of other options. For example,
468 if F is a symbolic link and archive.tar contains a regular-file member
469 also named F, "tar --overwrite -x -f archive.tar F" now overwrites F
470 itself, rather than the file that F points to. (To overwrite the file
471 that F points to, add the --dereference (-h) option.) Formerly,
472 --dereference was intended to apply only when using the -c option, but
473 the implementation was not consistent.
475 Also, the --dereference option no longer affects accesses to other
476 files, such as archives and time stamp files. Symbolic links to these
477 files are always followed. Previously, the links were usually but not
480 ** Spurious error diagnostics on broken pipe.
482 When receiving SIGPIPE, tar would exit with error status and
483 "write error" diagnostics. In particular, this occurred if
484 invoked as in the example below:
486 tar tf archive.tar | head -n 1
490 'tar --remove-files' failed to remove a directory which contained
491 symlinks to another files within that directory.
493 ** --test-label behavior
495 In case of a mismatch, 'tar --test-label LABEL' exits with code 1,
496 not 2 as it did in previous versions.
498 The '--verbose' option used with '--test-label' provides additional
501 Several volume labels may be specified in a command line, e.g.:
503 tar --test-label -f archive 'My volume' 'New volume' 'Test volume'
505 In this case, tar exits with code 0 if any one of the arguments
506 matches the actual volume label.
508 ** --label used with --update
510 The '--label' option can be used with '--update' to prevent accidental
511 update of an archive:
513 tar -rf archive --label 'My volume' .
515 This did not work in previous versions, in spite of what the docs said.
517 ** --record-size and --tape-length (-L) options
519 Usual size suffixes are allowed for these options. For example,
520 -L10k stands for a 10 kilobyte tape length.
522 ** Fix dead loop on extracting existing symlinks with the -k option.
525 version 1.23 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-03-10
527 * Record size autodetection
529 When listing or extracting archives, the actual record size is
530 reported only if the archive is read from a device (as opposed
531 to regular files and pipes).
535 When a read-only operation (e.g. --list or --extract) is requested
536 on a regular file, tar attemtps to speed up accesses by using lseek.
538 * New command line option '--warning'
540 The '--warning' command line option allows to suppress or enable
541 particular warning messages during 'tar' run. It takes a single
542 argument (a 'keyword'), identifying the class of warning messages
543 to affect. If the argument is prefixed with 'no-', such warning
544 messages are suppressed. For example,
546 tar --warning=no-alone-zero-block -x -f archive
548 suppresses the output of "A lone zero block" diagnostics, which is
549 normally issued if 'archive' ends with a single block of zeros.
551 See Tar Manual, section 3.9 "Controlling Warning Messages", for a
554 * New command line option '--level'
556 The '--level=N' option sets the incremental dump level N. It
557 is valid when used in conjunction with the -c and --listed-incremental
558 options. So far the only meaningful value for N is 0. The
559 '--level=0' option forces creating the level 0 dump, by truncating
560 the snapshot file if it exists.
562 * Files removed during incremental dumps
564 If a file or directory is removed while incremental dump is
565 in progress, tar exact actions depend on whether this file
566 was explicitly listed in the command line, or was found
567 during file system scan.
569 If the file was explicitly listed in the command line, tar
570 issues error message and exits with the code 2, meaning
573 Otherwise, if the file was found during the file system scan,
574 tar issues a warning, saying "File removed before we read it",
575 and sets exit code to 1, which means "some files differ".
576 If the --warning=no-file-removed option is given, no warning
577 is issued and exit code remains 0.
579 * Modification times of PAX extended headers.
581 Modification times in ustar header blocks of extended headers
582 are set to mtimes of the corresponding archive members. This
583 can be overridden by the
585 --pax-option='exthdr.mtime=STRING'
587 command line option. The STRING is either number of seconds since
588 the Epoch or a "Time reference" (see below).
590 Modification times in ustar header blocks of global extended
591 headers are set to the time when tar was invoked.
593 This can be overridden by the
595 --pax-option='globexthdr.mtime=STRING'
597 command line option. The STRING is either number of seconds since
598 the Epoch or a "Time reference" (see below).
600 * Time references in --pax-option argument.
602 Any value from the --pax-option argument that is enclosed in a pair
603 of curly braces represents a time reference. The string between the
604 braces is understood either as a textual time representation, as described in
605 chapter 7, "Date input formats", of the Tar manual, or as a name of
606 an existing file, starting with '/' or '.'. In the latter
607 case, it is replaced with the modification time of that file.
609 * Environment of --to-command script.
611 The environment passed to the --to-command script is extended with
612 the following variables:
614 TAR_VERSION GNU tar version number
615 TAR_ARCHIVE The name of the archive
616 TAR_VOLUME Ordinal number of the volume
617 TAR_FORMAT Format of the archive
618 TAR_BLOCKING_FACTOR Current blocking factor
621 ** Fix handling of hard link targets by -c --transform.
622 ** Fix hard links recognition with -c --remove-files.
623 ** Fix restoring files from backup (debian bug #508199).
624 ** Correctly restore modes and permissions on existing directories.
625 ** The --remove-files option removes files only if they were
626 succesfully stored in the archive.
627 ** Fix storing and listing of the volume labels in POSIX format.
628 ** Improve algorithm for splitting long file names (ustar
630 ** Fix possible memory overflow in the rmt client code (CVE-2010-0624).
633 version 1.22 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2009-03-05
635 * Support for xz compression
637 Tar uses xz for compression if one of the following conditions is met:
639 1. The option --xz or -J (see below) is used.
640 2. The xz binary is set as compressor using --use-compress-program option.
641 3. The file name of the archive being created ends in '.xz' and
642 auto-compress option (-a) is used.
644 Xz is used for decompression if one of the following conditions is met:
646 1. The option --xz or -J is used.
647 2. The xz binary is set as compressor using --use-compress-program option.
648 3. The file is recognized as xz compressed stream data.
650 * Short option -J reassigned as a short equivalent of --xz
654 The -I option is assigned as a short equivalent for
655 --use-compress-program.
657 * The --no-recursive option works in incremental mode.
660 version 1.21 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2008-12-27
662 * New short option -J
664 A shortcut for --lzma.
668 * New option --no-auto-compress
670 Cancels the effect of previous --auto-compress (-a) option.
672 * New option --no-null
674 Cancels the effect of previous --null option.
676 * Compressed format recognition
678 If tar is unable to determine archive compression format, it falls
679 back to using archive suffix to determine it.
683 Using --exclude-vcs handles also files used internally by Bazaar,
686 * Transformation scope flags
688 Name transformation expressions understand additional flags that
689 control type of archive members affected by them. The flags are:
692 Apply transformation to regular archive members.
695 Apply transformation to symbolic link targets.
698 Apply transformation to hard link targets.
700 Corresponding upper-case letters negate the meaning, so that
701 'H' means "do not apply transformation to hard link targets".
703 The scope flags are listed in the third part of an 's' expression,
706 tar --transform 's|^|/usr/local/|S'
708 Default is 'rsh', which means that transformations are applied to
709 both regular archive members and to the targets of symbolic and hard
710 links. If several transform expressions are used, the default flags
711 can be changed using 'flags=' statement before the expressions, e.g.:
713 tar --transform 'flags=S;s|^|/usr/local/|S'
717 ** The --null option disabled handling of tar options in list files. This
719 ** Fixed record size autodetection. If the detected record size differs from
720 the expected value (either default one, or the one set from the
721 command line), tar always prints a warning if verbosity level is set
722 to 1 or greater, i.e. if either -t or -v option is given.
726 version 1.20 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2008-04-14
728 * New option --auto-compress (-a)
730 With --create, selects compression algorithm basing on the suffix
731 of the archive file name.
735 Selects LZMA compression algorithm
737 * New option --hard-dereference
739 During archive creation, dereferences hard links and stores the files
740 they refer to, instead of creating usual hard link members (type '1').
742 * New option --checkpoint-action
744 This action allows to specify an action to be executed upon hitting a
745 checkpoint. Recognized actions are: dot, echo (the default),
746 echo=string, ttyout=string, exec=cmdline, and sleep=value. Any number
747 of '--checkpoint-action' options can be specified, the actions will be
748 executed in order of their appearance in the command line. See
749 chapter 3.8 "Checkpoints" for a complete description.
751 * New options --no-check-device, --check-device.
753 The '--no-check-device' option disables comparing device numbers during
754 preparatory stage of an incremental dump. This allows to avoid
755 creating full dumps if the device numbers change (e.g. when using an
758 The '--check-device' option enables comparing device numbers. This is
759 the default. This option is provided to undo the effect of the previous
760 '--no-check-device' option, e.g. if it was set in TAR_OPTIONS
761 environment variable.
763 * The --transform option.
765 Any number of '--transform' options can be given in the command line.
766 The specified transformations will be applied in turn.
768 The argument to '--transform' option can be a list of replace
769 expressions, separated by a semicolon (as in 'sed').
771 Filename transformations are applied to symbolic link targets
772 during both creation and extraction. Tar 1.19 used them only
775 For a detailed description, see chapter 6.7 "Modifying File and Member
778 * Info (end-of-volume) scripts
780 The value of the blocking factor is made available to info and
781 checkpoint scripts via environment variable TAR_BLOCKING_FACTOR.
783 * Incremental archives
785 Improved (sped up) extracting from incremental archives.
788 ** Fix bug introduced in version 1.19: tar refused to update non-existing
792 version 1.19 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2007-10-10
794 * New option --exclude-vcs
796 Excludes directories and files, created by several widely used version
797 control systems, e.g. "CVS/", ".svn/", etc.
799 * --exclude-tag and --exclude-cache options
801 The following options now work with incremental archives as well:
809 * Fix handling of renamed files in listed incremental archives.
811 Previous versions always stored absolute file names in rename
812 records, even if -P was not used. This is fixed: rename records
813 contain file names processed in accordance with the command line
816 * Fix --version output.
818 * Recognition of broken archives.
820 When supplied an archive smaller than 512 bytes in reading mode (-x,
821 -t), the previous version of tar silently ignored it, exiting with
822 code 0. It is fixed. Tar now issues the following diagnostic message:
823 'This does not look like a tar archive', and exits with code 2.
825 * Fix double-dot recognition in archive member names in case of duplicate '/.'.
827 * Fix file padding in case of truncation of the input file to zero size.
830 version 1.18 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2007-06-29
832 * Licensed under the GPLv3
834 * Fixed several bugs in the testsuite
837 version 1.17 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2007-06-08
839 * Fix archivation of sparse files in posix mode. Previous versions padded
840 sparse members with spurious zero blocks.
842 * Fix operation of --verify --listed-incremental. Version 1.16.1 produced
843 a full dump when both options were given.
845 * Fix --occurrence. In previous versions it continued scanning the archive
846 even though all requested members has already been extracted.
848 * Scope of --transform and --strip-components options.
850 In addition to affecting regular archive members, the --transform
851 option affects hard and soft link targets and the --strip-components
852 option affects hard link targets as well.
854 * End-of-volume script can send the new volume name to tar by writing
855 it to the file descriptor stored in the environment variable TAR_FD.
858 version 1.16.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-12-09
860 * New option --exclude-tag allows to specify "exclusion tag files", i.e.
861 files whose presence in a directory means that the directory should not
864 * The --exclude-cache option excludes directories that contain the
865 CACHEDIR.TAG file from being archived. Previous versions excluded
866 directory contents only, while the directories themselves were
867 still added to the archive.
869 * Support for reading ustar type 'N' header logical records has been removed.
870 This GNU extension was generated only by very old versions of GNU 'tar'.
871 Unfortunately its implementation had security holes; see
872 <http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2006-11/0344.html>.
873 We don't expect that any tar archives in practical use have type 'N'
874 records, but if you have one and you trust its contents, you can
875 decode it with GNU tar 1.16 or earlier.
877 * Race conditions have been fixed that in some cases briefly allowed
878 files extracted by 'tar -x --same-owner' (or plain 'tar -x', when
879 running as root) to be accessed by users that they shouldn't have been.
882 version 1.16 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-10-21
884 * After creating an archive, tar exits with code 1 if some files were
885 changed while being read. Previous versions exited with code 2 (fatal
886 error), and only if some files were truncated while being archived.
888 * New option --mtime allows to set modification times for all archive
889 members during creation.
892 ** Avoid running off file descriptors when using multiple -C options.
893 ** tar --index-file=FILE --file=- sent the archive to FILE, and
894 the listing to stderr.
897 version 1.15.91 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-06-16
899 * Incompatible changes
903 Previous versions of GNU tar assumed shell-style globbing when
904 extracting from or listing an archive. For example:
908 would extract all files whose names end in '.c'. This behavior
909 was not documented and was incompatible with traditional tar
910 implementations. Therefore, starting from this version, GNU tar
911 no longer uses globbing by default. For example, the above invocation
912 is now interpreted as a request to extract from the archive the file
915 To treat member names as globbing patterns, use --wildcards option.
916 If you wish tar to mimic the behavior of versions up to 1.15.90,
917 add --wildcards to the value of the environment variable TAR_OPTIONS.
919 The exact way in which tar interprets member names is controlled by the
920 following command line options:
922 --wildcards use wildcards
923 --anchored patterns match file name start
924 --ignore-case ignore case
925 --wildcards-match-slash wildcards match '/'
927 Each of these options has a '--no-' counterpart that disables its
928 effect (e.g. --no-wildcards).
930 These options affect both the interpretation of member names from
931 command line and that of the exclusion patterns (given with --exclude
932 and --exclude-from options). The defaults are:
934 1. For member names: --no-wildcards --anchored
935 2. For exclusion patterns: --wildcards --no-anchored --wildcards-match-slash
937 The options can appear multiple times in the command line, thereby
938 changing the way command line arguments are interpreted. For example,
939 to use case-insensitive matching in exclude patterns and to revert to
940 case-sensitive matching for the rest of command line, one could write:
942 tar xf foo.tar --ignore-case --exclude-from=FILE --no-ignore-case file.name
944 ** Short option -l is now an alias of --check-links option, which complies
945 with UNIX98. This ends the transition period started with version 1.14.
949 ** New option --transform allows to transform file names before storing them
950 in the archive or member names before extracting. The option takes a
951 sed replace expression as its argument. For example,
953 tar cf foo.tar --transform 's,^,prefix/,'
955 will add 'prefix/' to all file names stored in foo.tar.
957 ** --strip-components option works when deleting and comparing. In previous
958 versions it worked only with --extract.
960 ** New option --show-transformed-names enables display of transformed file
961 or archive. It generalizes --show-stored-names option, introduced in
962 1.15.90. In particular, when creating an archive in verbose mode, it lists
963 member names as stored in the archive, i.e., with any eventual prefixes
964 removed and file name transformations applied. The option is useful,
965 for example, while comparing 'tar cv' and 'tar tv' outputs.
967 ** New incremental snapshot file format keeps information about file names
968 as well as that about directories.
970 ** The --checkpoint option takes an optional argument specifying the number
971 of records between the two successive checkpoints. Optional dot
972 starting the argument intructs tar to print dots instead of textual
975 ** The --totals option can be used with any tar operation (previous versions
976 understood it only with --create). If an argument to this option is
977 given, it specifies the signal upon delivery of which the statistics
978 is to be printed. Both forms of this option (with and without
979 argument) can be given to in a single invocation of tar.
982 ** Detect attempts to update compressed archives.
985 version 1.15.90 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-02-19
989 ** Any number of -T (--files-from) options may be used in the command line.
990 The file specified with -T may include any valid 'tar' options,
991 including another -T option.
992 Compatibility note: older versions of tar would only recognize -C
993 as an option name within the file list file. Now any file whose name
994 starts with - is handled as an option. To insert file names starting with
995 dash, use the --add-file option.
997 ** List files containing null-separated file names are detected and processed
998 automatically. It is no longer necessary to give the --null option.
1000 ** New option --no-unquote disables the unquoting of input file names.
1001 This is useful for processing output from 'find dir -print0'.
1002 An orthogonal option --unquote is provided as well.
1004 ** New option --test-label tests the archive volume label.
1005 If an argument is specified, the label is compared against its value.
1006 Tar exits with code 0 if the two strings match, and with code 2 if
1009 If no argument is given, the --verbose option is implied. In this case,
1010 tar prints the label name if present and exits with code 0.
1012 ** New option --show-stored-names. When creating an archive in verbose mode,
1013 it lists member names as stored in the archive, i.e., with any eventual
1014 prefixes removed. The option is useful, for example, while comparing
1015 'tar cv' and 'tar tv' outputs.
1017 ** New option --to-command pipes the contents of archive members to the
1020 ** New option --atime-preserve=system, which uses the O_NOATIME feature
1021 of recent Linux kernels to avoid some problems when preserving file
1024 ** New option --delay-directory-restore delays restoring modification times
1025 and permissions of extracted directories until the end of extraction.
1026 This is necessary for restoring from archives with unusual member
1027 ordering (in particular, those created with --no-recursion option).
1028 This option is implied when restoring from incremental archives.
1030 ** New option --restrict prohibits use of some potentially harmful tar
1031 options. Currently it disables '!' escape in multi-volume name menu.
1033 ** New options --quoting-style and --quote-chars control the way tar
1034 quotes member names on output. The --quoting-style takes an argument
1035 specifying the quoting style to use (literal, shell, shell-always,
1036 c, escape, locale, clocale). The argument to --quote-chars is a string
1037 specifying characters to quote, even if the selected quoting style
1038 would not quote them otherwise. The option --no-quote-chars is
1039 provided to disable quoting certain characters.
1041 ** The end-of-volume script (introduced with --info-script option) can
1042 get current archive name from the environment variable TAR_ARCHIVE and
1043 the volume number from the variable TAR_VOLUME. It can alter the
1044 archive name by writing new name to the file descriptor 3.
1046 ** Better support for full-resolution time stamps. Tar cannot restore
1047 time stamps to full nanosecond resolution, though, until the kernel
1048 guys get their act together and give us a system call to set file time
1049 stamps to nanosecond resolution.
1051 ** The -v option now prints time stamps only to 1-minute resolution,
1052 not full resolution, to avoid using up too many output columns.
1053 Nanosecond resolution is now supported, but that would be too much.
1057 ** Allow non-option arguments to be interspersed with options.
1058 ** When extracting or listing archives in old GNU format, tar
1059 used to read an extra block of data after a long name header
1060 if length of the member name was divisible by block size (512).
1061 Consequently, the file pointer was set off and the next member
1062 was not processed correctly.
1063 ** Previous version created invalid archives when files shrink
1065 ** Compare mode (tar d) hung when trying to compare file contents.
1066 ** Previous versions in certain cases failed to restore directory
1068 ** When creating an archive, do not attempt to store files whose
1069 meta-data cannot be stored in the header due to format limitations
1070 (for ustar and v7 formats).
1071 ** The --version option now also outputs information about copyright,
1072 license, and credits. This reverts to the behavior of tar 1.14 and
1073 earlier, and conforms to the GNU coding standards. The --license (-L)
1074 option introduced in tar 1.15 has been removed, since it's no longer
1078 version 1.15.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-12-21
1080 This version fixes a bug introduced in 1.15 which caused
1081 tar to refuse to extract files from standard input.
1084 version 1.15 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-12-20
1086 * Compressed archives are recognised automatically, it is no longer
1087 necessary to specify -Z, -z, or -j options to read them. Thus, you can
1088 now run 'tar tf archive.tar.gz'.
1090 * When restoring incremental dumps, --one-file-system option
1091 prevents directory hierarchies residing on different devices
1094 With the previous versions of tar it was dangerous to create
1095 incremental dumps with --one-file-system option, since they
1096 would recursively remove mount points when restoring from the
1097 back up. This change fixes the bug.
1099 * Renamed --strip-path to --strip-components for consistency with
1102 * Skipping archive members is sped up if the archive media supports
1105 * Restore script starts restoring only if it is given --all (-a) option,
1106 or some patterns. This is to prevent accidental restores.
1108 * 'tar --verify' prints a warning if during archive creation some of
1109 the file names had their prefixes stripped off.
1111 * New option --exclude-caches instructs tar to exclude cache directories
1112 automatically on archive creation. Cache directories are those
1113 containing a standardized tag file, as specified at:
1115 http://www.brynosaurus.com/cachedir/spec.html
1117 * New configure option --with-rmt allows to specify full path name to
1118 the 'rmt' utility. This supersedes DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND variable
1119 introduced in version 1.14
1121 * New configure variable DEFAULT_RMT_DIR allows to specify the directory
1122 where to install 'rmt' utility. This is necessary since modifying
1123 --libexecdir as was suggested for version 1.14 produced a side effect: it
1124 also modified installation prefix for backup scripts (if
1125 --enable-backup-scripts was given).
1128 ** Fixed flow in recognizing files to be included in incremental dumps.
1129 ** Correctly recognize sparse archive members when used with -T option.
1130 ** GNU multivolume headers cannot store filenames longer than 100 characters.
1131 Do not allow multivolume archives to begin with such filenames.
1132 ** If a member with link count > 2 was stored in the archive twice,
1133 previous versions of tar were not able to extract it, since they
1134 were trying to link the file to itself, which always failed and
1135 lead to removing the already extracted copy. Preserve the first
1136 extracted copy in such cases.
1137 ** Restore script was passing improper argument to tar --listed option (which
1138 didn't affect the functionality, but was logically incorrect).
1139 ** Fixed verification of created archives.
1140 ** Fixed unquoting of file names containing backslash escapes (previous
1141 versions failed to recognize \a and \v).
1142 ** When attempting to delete a non-existing member from the archive, previous
1143 versions of tar used to overwrite last archive block with zeroes.
1146 version 1.14 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-05-11
1148 * Added support for POSIX.1-2001 and ustar archive formats.
1149 * New option --format allows to select the output archive format
1150 * The default output format can be selected at configuration time
1151 by presetting the environment variable DEFAULT_ARCHIVE_FORMAT.
1152 Allowed values are GNU, V7, OLDGNU and POSIX.
1153 * New option --strip-path allows to cut off a given number of
1154 path elements from the name of the file being extracted.
1156 * New options --index-file, --no-overwrite-dir. The --overwrite-dir
1157 option is now the default; use --no-overwrite-dir if you prefer
1158 the previous default behavior.
1160 * The semantics of -o option is changed. When extracting, it
1161 does the same as --no-same-owner GNU tar option. This is compatible
1162 with UNIX98 tar. Otherwise, its effect is the same as that of
1163 --old-archive option. This latter is deprecated and will be removed
1166 * New option --check-links prints a message if not all links are dumped
1167 for a file being archived. This corresponds to the UNIX98 -l option.
1168 The current semantics of the -l option is retained for compatibility
1169 with previous releases, however such usage is strongly deprecated as
1170 the option will change to its UNIX98 semantics in the future releases.
1172 * New option --occurrence[=N] can be used in conjunction with one of
1173 the subcommands --delete, --diff, --extract or --list when a list of
1174 files is given either on the command line or via -T option. This
1175 option instructs tar to process only the Nth occurrence of each named
1176 file. N defaults to 1, so 'tar -x -f archive --occurrence filename'
1177 extracts the first occurrence of 'filename' from 'archive'
1178 and terminates without scanning to the end of the archive.
1180 * New option --pax-option allows to control the handling of POSIX
1181 keywords in 'pax' extended headers. It is equivalent to 'pax'
1184 * --incremental and --listed-incremental options work correctly on
1185 individual files, as well as on directories.
1187 * New scripts: backup (replaces old level-0 and level-1) and restore.
1188 The scripts are compiled and installed if --enable-backup-scripts
1189 option is given to configure.
1191 * By default tar searches "rmt" utility in "$prefix/libexec/rmt",
1192 which is consistent with the location where the version of "rmt"
1193 included in the package is installed. Previous versions of tar
1194 used "/etc/rmt". To install "rmt" to its traditional location,
1195 run configure with option --libexecdir=/etc. Otherwise, if you
1196 already have rmt installed and wish to use it, instead of the
1197 shipped in version, set the variable DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND to
1198 the full path name of the utility, e.g., ./configure
1199 DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND=/etc/rmt.
1201 Notice also that the full path name of the "rmt" utility to
1202 use can be set at runtime, by giving option --rmt-command to
1205 * Removed obsolete command line options:
1206 ** --absolute-paths superseded by --absolute-names
1207 ** --block-compress is not needed any longer
1208 ** --block-size superseded by --blocking-factor
1209 ** --modification-time superseded by --touch
1210 ** --read-full-blocks superseded by --read-full-records
1211 ** --record-number superseded by --block-number
1212 ** --version-control superseded by --backup
1214 * New message translations fi (Finnish), gl (Galician), hr (Croatian),
1215 hu (Hungarian), ms (Malaysian), nb (Norwegian), ro (Romanian), sk
1216 (Slovak), zh_CN (Chinese simplified), zh_TW (Chinese traditional).
1217 The code 'no' for Norwegian (Bokmål) has been withdrawn; use 'nb' instead.
1222 version 1.13.25 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-26
1227 version 1.13.24 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-22
1229 * New option --overwrite-dir.
1230 * Fixes for buffer overrun, porting, and copyright notice problems.
1231 * The message translations for Korean are available again.
1234 version 1.13.23 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-13
1236 * Bug, porting, and copyright notice fixes.
1239 version 1.13.22 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-29
1244 version 1.13.21 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-28
1246 * Porting and copyright notice fixes.
1249 version 1.13.20 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-27
1251 * Some bugs were fixed:
1253 - hard links to symbolic links
1255 * New option --recursion (the default) that is the inverse of --no-recursion.
1257 * New options --anchored, --ignore-case, --wildcards,
1258 --wildcards-match-slash, and their negations (e.g., --no-anchored).
1259 Along with --recursion and --no-recursion, these options control how
1260 exclude patterns are interpreted.
1262 * The default interpretation of exclude patterns is now --no-anchored
1263 --no-ignore-case --recursion --wildcards --wildcards-match-slash.
1264 This is a quiet change to the semantics of --exclude. The previous
1265 semantics were a failed attempt at backward compatibility but it
1266 became clear that the semantics were puzzling and did not satisfy
1267 everybody. Rather than continue to try to revive that dead horse we
1268 thought it better to substitute cleaner semantics, with options so
1269 that you can change the behavior more to your liking.
1271 * New message translations for Indonesian and Turkish.
1272 The translation for Korean has been withdrawn due to encoding errors.
1273 It will be reissued once those are fixed.
1276 version 1.13.19 - Paul Eggert, 2001-01-13
1278 * The -I option has been withdrawn, as it was buggy and confusing.
1279 Eventually it is planned to be reintroduced, with the same meaning as -T.
1281 * With an option like -N DATE, if DATE starts with "/" or ".", it is taken
1282 to be a file name; the last-modified time of that file is used as the date.
1285 version 1.13.18 - Paul Eggert, 2000-10-29
1287 * Some security problems have been fixed. 'tar -x' now modifies only
1288 files under the working directory, unless you also specify an unsafe
1289 option like --absolute-names or --overwrite.
1291 * The short name of the --bzip option has been changed to -j,
1292 and -I is now an alias for -T, for compatibility with Solaris tar.
1294 * The manual is now distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
1296 * The new environment variable TAR_OPTIONS holds default command-line options.
1298 * The --no-recursion option now affects extraction too.
1300 * The wording in some diagnostics has been changed slightly.
1302 * Snapshot files now record whether each file was accessed via NFS.
1303 The new file format is upward- and downward-compatible with the old.
1305 * New language supported: da.
1307 * Compilation by traditional (K&R) C compilers is no longer supported.
1308 If you still use such a compiler, please use GCC instead.
1310 * This version of tar works best with GNU gzip test version 1.3 or later.
1311 Please see <ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gzip/>.
1313 * 'tar --delete -f -' now works again.
1316 version 1.13.17 - Paul Eggert, 2000-01-07.
1318 * 'tar --delete -f -' is no longer allowed; it was too buggy.
1319 * Diagnostic messages have been made more regular and consistent.
1322 version 1.13.16 - Paul Eggert, 1999-12-13.
1324 * By default, tar now refuses to overwrite an existing file when
1325 extracting files from an archive; instead, it removes the file
1326 before extracting it. If the existing file is a symbolic link, the
1327 link is removed and not the pointed-to file. There is one
1328 exception: existing nonempty directories are not removed, nor are
1329 their ownerships or permissions extracted. This fixes some
1330 longstanding security problems.
1332 The new --overwrite option enables the old default behavior.
1334 For regular files, tar implements this change by using the O_EXCL
1335 option of 'open' to ensure that it creates the file; if this fails, it
1336 removes the file and tries again. This is similar to the behavior of
1337 the --unlink-first option, but it is faster in the common case of
1338 extracting a new directory.
1340 * By default, tar now ignores file names containing a component of '..'
1341 when extracting, and warns about such file names when creating an archive.
1342 To enable the old behavior, use the -P or --absolute-names option.
1344 * Tar now handles file names with multibyte encodings (e.g., UTF-8, Shift-JIS)
1345 correctly. It relies on the mbrtowc function to handle multibyte characters.
1347 * The file generated by -g or --listed-incremental now uses a format
1348 that is independent of locale, so that users need not worry about
1349 locale when restoring a backup. This is needed for proper support
1350 of multibyte characters. Old-format files can still be read, and
1351 older versions of GNU tar can read new-format files, unless member
1352 names have multibyte chars.
1354 * Many diagnostics have been changed slightly, so that file names are
1355 now output unambiguously. File names in diagnostics now are either
1356 `quoted like this' (in the default C locale) or are followed by
1357 colon, newline, or space, depending on context. Unprintable
1358 characters are escaped with a C-like backslash conventions.
1359 Terminating characters (e.g., close-quote, colon, newline)
1360 are also escaped as needed.
1362 * tar now ignores socket files when creating an archive.
1363 Previously tar archived sockets as fifos, which caused problems.
1366 version 1.13.15 - Paul Eggert, 1999-12-03.
1368 * If a file's ctime changes when being archived, report an error.
1369 Previously tar looked at mtime, which missed some errors.
1372 version 1.13.14 - Paul Eggert, 1999-11-07.
1374 * New translations ja, pt_BR.
1375 * New options --help and --version for rmt.
1376 * Ignore Solaris door files when creating an archive.
1379 version 1.13.13 - Paul Eggert, 1999-10-11.
1381 * Invalid headers in tar files now elicit errors, not just warnings.
1382 * 'tar --version' output conforms to the latest GNU coding standards.
1383 * If you specify an invalid date, 'tar' now substitutes (time_t) -1.
1384 * 'configure --with-dmalloc' is no longer available.
1387 version 1.13.12 - Paul Eggert, 1999-09-24.
1389 * 'tar' now supports hard links to symbolic links.
1391 * New options --no-same-owner, --no-same-permissions.
1393 * --total now also outputs a human-readable size, and a throughput value.
1395 * 'tar' now uses two's-complement base-256 when outputting header
1396 values that are out of the range of the standard unsigned base-8
1397 format. This affects archive members with negative or huge time
1398 stamps or uids, and archive members 8 GB or larger. The new tar
1399 archives cannot be read by traditional tar, or by older versions of
1400 GNU tar. Use the --old-archive option to revert to the old
1401 behavior, which uses unportable representations for negative values,
1402 and which rejects large files.
1404 * On 32-bit hosts, 'tar' now assumes that an incoming time stamp T in
1405 the range 2**31 <= T < 2**32 represents the negative time (T -
1406 2**32). This behavior is nonstandard and is not portable to 64-bit
1407 time_t hosts, so 'tar' issues a warning.
1409 * 'tar' no longer gives up extracting immediately upon discovering
1410 that an archive contains garbage at the end. It attempts to extract
1411 as many files as possible from the good data before the garbage.
1413 * A read error now causes a nonzero exit status, not just a warning.
1415 * Some diagnostics have been reworded for consistency.
1418 version 1.13.11 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-23.
1420 * The short name of the --bzip option has been changed to -I,
1421 for compatibility with paxutils.
1423 * -T /dev/null now matches nothing; previously, it matched anything
1424 if no explicit operands were given.
1426 * The '--' option now works the same as with other GNU utilities;
1427 it causes later operands to be interpreted as file names, not options,
1428 even if they begin with '-'.
1430 * For the --newer and --after-date options, the table of time zone
1431 abbreviations like 'EST' has been updated to match current practice.
1432 Also, local time abbreviations are now recognized, even if they are
1433 not in tar's hardwired table. Remember, though, that you should use
1434 numeric UTC offsets like '-0500' instead of abbreviations like
1435 'EST', as abbreviations are not standardized and are ambiguous.
1438 version 1.13.10 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-20.
1440 * 'tar' now uses signed base-64 when outputting header values that are
1441 out of the range of the standard unsigned base-8 format. [This
1442 change was superseded in 1.13.12, described above.]
1445 version 1.13.9 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-18.
1447 * 'tar' now writes two zero blocks at end-of-archive instead of just one.
1448 POSIX.1 requires this, and some other 'tar' implementations check for it.
1450 * 'tar' no longer silently accepts a block containing nonzero checksum bytes
1453 * 'tar' now reads buggy tar files that have a null byte at the start of a
1454 numeric header field.
1457 version 1.13.8 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-16.
1459 * For compatibility with traditional 'tar', intermediate directories
1460 created automatically by root are no longer given the uid and gid of
1461 the original file or directory.
1464 version 1.13.7 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-14.
1466 * --listed-incremental and --newer are now incompatible options.
1468 * When creating an archive, leading './' is no longer stripped,
1469 to match traditional tar's behavior (and simplify the documentation).
1471 * --diff without --absolute-names no longer falls back on absolute names.
1474 version 1.13.6 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-11.
1476 * An --exclude pattern containing / now excludes a file only if it matches an
1477 initial prefix of the file name; a pattern without / continues to
1478 exclude a file if it matches any file name component.
1480 * The protocol for talking to rmt has been extended slightly.
1481 Open flags are now communicated in symbolic format as well as numeric.
1482 The symbolic format (e.g., "O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC") is for portability
1483 when rmt is operating on a different operating system from tar.
1484 The numeric format is retained, and rmt uses it if symbolic format is absent,
1485 for backward compatibility with older versions of tar and rmt.
1487 * When writing GNU tar format headers, tar now uses signed base-64
1488 for values that cannot be represented in unsigned octal.
1489 This supports larger files (2**66 - 1 bytes instead of 2**33 - 1 bytes),
1490 larger uids, negative time stamps, etc.
1492 * When extracting files with unknown ownership, tar now looks up the
1493 uid and gid "nobody" on hosts whose headers do not define UID_NOBODY
1494 and GID_NOBODY, and falls back on uid/gid -2 if there is no "nobody".
1496 * tar -t --numeric-owner now prints numeric uids and gids, not symbolic.
1498 * New option -y or --bzip2 for bzip2 compression, by popular request.
1501 version 1.13.5 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-20.
1503 * Do the delayed updates of file metadata even after a fatal error.
1506 version 1.13.4 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-20.
1508 * Do not chmod unless we are root or the -p option was given;
1509 this matches historical practice.
1512 version 1.13.3 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-16.
1514 * A path name is excluded if any of its file name components matches an
1515 excluded pattern, even if the path name was specified on the command line.
1516 Also see 1.13.6 for later changes in this area.
1519 version 1.13.2 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-14.
1521 * Bug reporting address changed to <bug-tar@gnu.org>.
1524 version 1.13.1 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-12.
1528 version 1.13 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-08.
1530 * Support for large files, e.g., files larger than 2 GB on many 32-bit hosts.
1531 Also, support for larger uids, device ids, etc.
1532 * Many bug fixes and porting fixes.
1533 * This release is only for fixes. A more ambitious test release,
1534 with new features, is available as part of the paxutils. Please see:
1535 ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/paxutils/
1536 The fixes in this release are intended to be merged with paxutils
1537 at some point, but they haven't been merged yet.
1538 * An interim GNU tar alpha had new --bzip2 and --ending-file options,
1539 but they have been removed to maintain compatibility with paxutils.
1540 Please try --use=bzip2 instead of --bzip2.
1542 Version 1.12 - François Pinard, 1997-04.
1545 * Use shell globbing patterns for --label, instead of regular expressions.
1546 * Do not quote anymore internally over the quoting done by the shell.
1549 * Offer internationalization capabilities of most recent GNU gettext.
1550 * Messages available in many more languages, thanks to all translators!
1551 * Usage of ISO 8601 dates in listings, instead of local American dates.
1552 * More normalization and cleanup in error messages.
1555 * For helping using tar with find, offer a --no-recursion option.
1556 * Implement --numeric-owner for ignoring symbolic names at create time.
1557 * New --owner, --group --mode options, still preliminary.
1558 * Recognize creating an archive on /dev/null, so Amanda works faster.
1559 * Object to the creation of an empty archive (like in 'tar cf FILE').
1560 * Barely start implementing --posix and POSIXLY_CORRECT.
1563 * Make a better job at restoring file and directory attributes.
1564 * Automatically attempt deleting existing files when in the way.
1565 * Option --unlink-first (-U) removes most files prior to extraction.
1566 * Option --recursive-unlink removes non-empty directories when in the way.
1567 * Option --numeric-owner ignores owner/group names, it uses UID/GID instead.
1568 * Use global umask when creating missing intermediate directories.
1569 * When symlinks are not available, extract symbolic links as hard links.
1570 * Diagnose extraction of contiguous files as regular files.
1571 * New --backup, --suffix and --version-control options.
1574 * Better support of huge archives with --tape-length and --totals.
1575 * Rename option --read-full-blocks (-B) to --read-full-records (-B).
1576 * Rename option --block-size (-b) to --blocking-factor (-b).
1577 * Rename option --record-number (-R) to --block-number (-R).
1578 * With --block-number (-R), report null blocks and end of file.
1579 * Implement --record-size for introducing a size in bytes.
1580 * Delete --block-compress option and rather decide it automatically.
1581 * Rename option --modification-time to --touch.
1583 Many bugs are squashed, while others still run free.
1585 Version 1.11.8 - François Pinard, 1995-06.
1587 * Messages available in French, German, Portuguese and Swedish.
1588 * The distribution provides a rudimentary Texinfo manual.
1589 * The device defaults to stdin/stdout, unless overridden by the installer.
1590 * Option --sparse (-S) should work on more systems.
1591 * Option --rsh-command may select an alternative remote shell program.
1593 Most changes are internal, and should yield better portability.
1595 Version 1.11.2 - Michael Bushnell, 1993-03.
1597 * Changes in backup scripts: cleaned up considerably; notices error
1598 conditions better over rsh; DUMP_REMIND_SCRIPT is now an option in
1599 backup-specs; new file dump-remind is an example of a
1602 * Superfluous "Reading dirname" was a bug; fixed.
1604 * Incompatibility problems with a bug on Solaris are fixed.
1606 * New option --gzip (aliases are --ungzip and -z); calls gzip instead
1607 of compress. Also, --use-compress-program lets you specify any
1608 compress program. --compress-block is renamed --block-compress and
1609 now requires one of the three compression options to be specified.
1611 * Several error messages are cleaned up.
1613 * Directory owners are now set properly when running as root.
1615 * Provide DUMP_REMIND_SCRIPT in backup-specs as a possible option
1618 * Behave better with broken rmt servers.
1620 * Dump scripts no longer use --atime-preserve; this causes a nasty probem.
1622 * Several Makefile cleanups.
1624 Version 1.11.1 - Michael Bushnell, 1992-09.
1628 Version 1.11 - Michael Bushnell, 1992-09.
1629 Version 1.10.16 - 1992-07.
1630 Version 1.10.15 - 1992-06.
1631 Version 1.10.14 - 1992-05.
1632 Version 1.10.13 - 1992-01.
1636 * Now uses GNU standard configure, generated by Autoconf.
1638 * Long options now use '--'; use of '+' is deprecated and support
1639 for it will eventually be removed.
1641 * New option --null causes filenames read by -T to be
1642 null-terminated, and causes -C to be ignored.
1644 * New option --remove-files deletes files (but not directories)
1645 after they are added to the archive.
1647 * New option --ignore-failed-read prevents read-errors from affecting
1650 * New option --checkpoint prints occasional messages as the tape
1651 is being read or written.
1653 * New option --show-omitted-dirs prints the names of directories
1654 omitted from the archive.
1656 * Some tape drives which use a non-standard method of indicating
1657 end-of-tape now work correctly with multi-tape archives.
1659 * --volno-file: Read the volume number used in prompting the user
1660 (but not in recording volume ID's on the archive) from a file.
1662 * When using --multi-volume, you can now give multiple -f arguments;
1663 the various tape drives will get used in sequence and then wrap
1664 around to the beginning.
1666 * Remote archive names no longer have to be in /dev: any file with a
1667 ':' is interpreted as remote. If new option --force-local is given,
1668 then even archive files with a ':' are considered local.
1670 * New option --atime-preserve restores (if possible) atimes to
1671 their original values after dumping the file.
1673 * No longer does tar confusingly dump "." when you don't tell it
1676 * When extracting directories, tar now correctly restores their
1677 modification and access times.
1679 * Longnames support is redone differently--long name info directly
1680 precedes the long-named file or link in the archive, so you no
1681 longer have to wait for the extract to hit the end of the tape for
1684 Version 1.10 - Michael Bushnell, 1991-07.
1686 * Filename to -G is optional. -C works right. Names +newer and
1687 +newer-mtime work right.
1689 * -g is now +incremental, -G is now +listed-incremental.
1691 * Sparse files now work correctly.
1693 * +volume is now called +label.
1695 * +exclude now takes a filename argument, and +exclude-from does
1696 what +exclude used to do.
1698 * Exit status is now correct.
1700 * +totals keeps track of total I/O and prints it when tar exits.
1702 * When using +label with +extract, the label is now a regexp.
1704 * New option +tape-length (-L) does multi-volume handling like BSD
1705 dump: you tell tar how big the tape is and it will prompt at that
1706 point instead of waiting for a write error.
1708 * New backup scripts level-0 and level-1 which might be useful
1709 to people. They use a file "backup-specs" for information, and
1710 shouldn't need local modification. These are what we use to do
1711 all our backups at the FSF.
1713 Version 1.09 - Jay Fenlason, 1990-10.
1714 Version 1.08 - Jay Fenlason, 1990-01.
1715 Versions 1.07 back to 1.00 by Jay Fenlason.
1717 * See ChangeLog for more details.
1721 Copyright 1994-2021 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
1723 This file is part of GNU tar.
1725 GNU tar is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
1726 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
1727 the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
1728 (at your option) any later version.
1730 GNU tar is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
1731 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
1732 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
1733 GNU General Public License for more details.
1735 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
1736 along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
1740 paragraph-separate: "[
\f]*$"
1741 eval: (add-hook 'write-file-hooks 'time-stamp)
1742 time-stamp-start: "changes. "
1743 time-stamp-format: "%:y-%02m-%02d"
1744 time-stamp-end: "\n"