NEWS 54 KB

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384858687888990919293949596979899100101102103104105106107108109110111112113114115116117118119120121122123124125126127128129130131132133134135136137138139140141142143144145146147148149150151152153154155156157158159160161162163164165166167168169170171172173174175176177178179180181182183184185186187188189190191192193194195196197198199200201202203204205206207208209210211212213214215216217218219220221222223224225226227228229230231232233234235236237238239240241242243244245246247248249250251252253254255256257258259260261262263264265266267268269270271272273274275276277278279280281282283284285286287288289290291292293294295296297298299300301302303304305306307308309310311312313314315316317318319320321322323324325326327328329330331332333334335336337338339340341342343344345346347348349350351352353354355356357358359360361362363364365366367368369370371372373374375376377378379380381382383384385386387388389390391392393394395396397398399400401402403404405406407408409410411412413414415416417418419420421422423424425426427428429430431432433434435436437438439440441442443444445446447448449450451452453454455456457458459460461462463464465466467468469470471472473474475476477478479480481482483484485486487488489490491492493494495496497498499500501502503504505506507508509510511512513514515516517518519520521522523524525526527528529530531532533534535536537538539540541542543544545546547548549550551552553554555556557558559560561562563564565566567568569570571572573574575576577578579580581582583584585586587588589590591592593594595596597598599600601602603604605606607608609610611612613614615616617618619620621622623624625626627628629630631632633634635636637638639640641642643644645646647648649650651652653654655656657658659660661662663664665666667668669670671672673674675676677678679680681682683684685686687688689690691692693694695696697698699700701702703704705706707708709710711712713714715716717718719720721722723724725726727728729730731732733734735736737738739740741742743744745746747748749750751752753754755756757758759760761762763764765766767768769770771772773774775776777778779780781782783784785786787788789790791792793794795796797798799800801802803804805806807808809810811812813814815816817818819820821822823824825826827828829830831832833834835836837838839840841842843844845846847848849850851852853854855856857858859860861862863864865866867868869870871872873874875876877878879880881882883884885886887888889890891892893894895896897898899900901902903904905906907908909910911912913914915916917918919920921922923924925926927928929930931932933934935936937938939940941942943944945946947948949950951952953954955956957958959960961962963964965966967968969970971972973974975976977978979980981982983984985986987988989990991992993994995996997998999100010011002100310041005100610071008100910101011101210131014101510161017101810191020102110221023102410251026102710281029103010311032103310341035103610371038103910401041104210431044104510461047104810491050105110521053105410551056105710581059106010611062106310641065106610671068106910701071107210731074107510761077107810791080108110821083108410851086108710881089109010911092109310941095109610971098109911001101110211031104110511061107110811091110111111121113111411151116111711181119112011211122112311241125112611271128112911301131113211331134113511361137113811391140114111421143114411451146114711481149115011511152115311541155115611571158115911601161116211631164116511661167116811691170117111721173117411751176117711781179118011811182118311841185118611871188118911901191119211931194119511961197119811991200120112021203120412051206120712081209121012111212121312141215121612171218121912201221122212231224122512261227122812291230123112321233123412351236123712381239124012411242124312441245124612471248124912501251125212531254125512561257125812591260126112621263126412651266126712681269127012711272127312741275127612771278127912801281128212831284128512861287128812891290129112921293129412951296129712981299130013011302130313041305130613071308130913101311131213131314131513161317131813191320132113221323132413251326132713281329133013311332133313341335133613371338133913401341134213431344134513461347134813491350135113521353135413551356135713581359136013611362136313641365136613671368136913701371137213731374137513761377137813791380138113821383138413851386138713881389139013911392139313941395139613971398139914001401140214031404140514061407140814091410141114121413141414151416141714181419142014211422142314241425142614271428142914301431143214331434143514361437143814391440144114421443144414451446144714481449145014511452145314541455145614571458145914601461146214631464146514661467146814691470147114721473147414751476147714781479148014811482
  1. GNU tar NEWS - User visible changes. 2014-01-21
  2. Please send GNU tar bug reports to <bug-tar@gnu.org>
  3. version 1.27.90 (Git)
  4. * New checkpoint action: totals
  5. The --checkpoint-action=totals option instructs tar to output the
  6. total number of bytes transferred at each checkpoint.
  7. * Extended checkpoint format specification.
  8. New conversion specifiers are implemented:
  9. %d - output number of seconds since tar started
  10. %T - output I/O totals
  11. %{FMT}t - output current local time using FMT as strftime(3) format
  12. If {FMT} is omitted, use %c
  13. %{N}* - pad output with spaces to the Nth column, or to the
  14. current screen width, if {N} is not given.
  15. version 1.27.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2013-11-17
  16. * Bug fixes
  17. * Fix unquoting of file names obtained via the -T option.
  18. * Fix GNU long link header timestamp (backward compatibility).
  19. * Fix extracting sparse members from star archives.
  20. version 1.27 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2013-10-05
  21. * Bug fixes
  22. ** Sparse files with large data
  23. When creating a PAX-format archive, tar no longer arbitrarily restricts
  24. the size of the representation of a sparse file to be less than 8 GiB.
  25. * Quoting
  26. In the default C locale, diagnostics and output of 'tar' have been
  27. adjusted to quote 'like this' (with apostrophes) instead of `like this'
  28. (with an accent grave character and an apostrophe). This tracks
  29. recent changes to the GNU coding standards.
  30. * --owner and --group names and numbers
  31. The --owner and --group options now accept operands of the form
  32. NAME:NUM, so that you can specify both symbolic name and numeric ID
  33. for owner and group. In these options, NAME no longer needs to be
  34. present in the current host's user and group databases.
  35. * The --keep-old-files and --skip-old-files options.
  36. This release restores the traditional functionality of the
  37. --keep-old-files. This option causes tar to avoid replacing
  38. existing files while extracting and to treat such files as errors.
  39. Tar will emit a prominent error message upon encountering such files
  40. and will exit with code 2 when finished extracting the archive.
  41. A new option --skip-old-files is introduced, which acts exactly as
  42. --keep-old-files, except that it does not treat existing files as
  43. errors. Instead it just silently skips them. An additional level of
  44. verbosity can be obtained by using the option --warning=existing-file
  45. together with this option.
  46. * Support for POSIX ACLs, extended attributes and SELinux context.
  47. Starting with this version tar is able to store, extract and list
  48. extended file attributes, POSIX.1e ACLs and SELinux context. This is
  49. controlled by the command line options --xattrs, --acls and --selinux,
  50. correspondingly. Each of these options has a `--no-' counterpart
  51. (e.g. --no-xattrs), which disables the corresponding feature.
  52. Additionally, the options --xattrs-include and --xattrs-exclude allow
  53. you to selectively control for which files to store (or extract) the
  54. extended attributes.
  55. * Passing command line arguments to external commands.
  56. Any option taking a command name as its argument now accepts a full
  57. command line as well. Thus, it is now possible to pass additional
  58. arguments to invoked programs. The affected options are:
  59. --checkpoint-action=exec
  60. -I, --use-compress-program
  61. -F, --info-script
  62. --to-command
  63. Furthermore, if any additional information is supplied to such a
  64. command via environment variables, these variables can now be used in
  65. the command line itself. Care should be taken to escape them, to
  66. prevent from being expanded too early, for example:
  67. tar -x -f a.tar --info-script='changevol $TAR_ARCHIVE $TAR_VOLUME'
  68. * New configure option --enable-gcc-warnings, intended for debugging.
  69. * New warning control option --warning=[no-]record-size
  70. On extraction, this option controls whether to display actual record
  71. size, if it differs from the default.
  72. * New command line option --keep-directory-symlink
  73. By default, if trying to extract a directory from the archive,
  74. tar discovers that the corresponding file name already exists and is a
  75. symbolic link, it first unlinks the entry, and then extracts the directory.
  76. This option disables this behavior and instructs tar to follow
  77. symlinks to directories when extracting from the archive.
  78. It is mainly intended to provide compatibility with the Slackware
  79. installation scripts.
  80. version 1.26 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2011-03-12
  81. * Bugfixes
  82. ** Fix the --verify option, which broke in version 1.24.
  83. ** Fix storing long sparse file names in PAX archives.
  84. ** Fix correctness of --atime-preserve=replace
  85. tar --atime-preserve=replace no longer tries to restore atime of
  86. zero-sized files.
  87. ** Work around POSIX incompatibilities on FreeBSD, NetBSD and Tru64
  88. ** Fix bug with --one-file-system --listed-incremental
  89. When invoked with these two options, tar 1.25 would add only the
  90. top-level directory to the archive, but not its contents.
  91. version 1.25 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-11-07
  92. * Fix extraction of empty directories with the -C option in effect.
  93. * Fix extraction of device nodes.
  94. * Make sure name matching occurs before eventual name transformation.
  95. Tar 1.24 changed the ordering of name matching and name transformation
  96. so that the former saw already transformed file names. This made it
  97. impossible to match file names in certain cases. It is fixed now.
  98. * Fix the behavior of tar -x --overwrite on hosts lacking O_NOFOLLOW.
  99. * Improve the testsuite.
  100. * Alternative decompression programs.
  101. If extraction from a compressed archive fails because the corresponding
  102. compression program is not installed and the following two conditions
  103. are met, tar retries extraction using an alternative decompressor:
  104. 1. Another compression program supported by tar is able to handle this
  105. compression format.
  106. 2. The compression program was not explicitly requested in the command
  107. line by the use of such options as -z, -j, etc.
  108. For example, if 'compress' is not available, tar will try 'gzip'.
  109. version 1.24 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-10-24
  110. * The --full-time option.
  111. New command line option '--full-time' instructs tar to output file
  112. time stamps to the full resolution.
  113. * Bugfixes.
  114. ** More reliable directory traversal when creating archives
  115. Tar now checks for inconsistencies caused when a file system is
  116. modified while tar is creating an archive. In the new approach, tar
  117. maintains a cache of file descriptors to directories, so it uses more
  118. file descriptors than before, but it adjusts to system limits on
  119. the number of file descriptors. Tar also takes more care when
  120. a file system is modified while tar is extracting from an archive.
  121. The new checks are implemented via the openat and related calls
  122. standardized by POSIX.1-2008. On an older system where these calls do
  123. not exist or do not return useful results, tar emulates the calls at
  124. some cost in efficiency and reliability.
  125. ** Symbolic link attributes
  126. When extracting symbolic links, tar now restores attributes such as
  127. last-modified time and link permissions, if the operating system
  128. supports this. For example, recent versions of the Linux kernel
  129. support setting times on symlinks, and some BSD kernels also support
  130. symlink permissions.
  131. ** --dereference consistency
  132. The --dereference (-h) option now applies to files that are copied
  133. into or out of archives, independently of other options. For example,
  134. if F is a symbolic link and archive.tar contains a regular-file member
  135. also named F, "tar --overwrite -x -f archive.tar F" now overwrites F
  136. itself, rather than the file that F points to. (To overwrite the file
  137. that F points to, add the --dereference (-h) option.) Formerly,
  138. --dereference was intended to apply only when using the -c option, but
  139. the implementation was not consistent.
  140. Also, the --dereference option no longer affects accesses to other
  141. files, such as archives and time stamp files. Symbolic links to these
  142. files are always followed. Previously, the links were usually but not
  143. always followed.
  144. ** Spurious error diagnostics on broken pipe.
  145. When receiving SIGPIPE, tar would exit with error status and
  146. "write error" diagnostics. In particular, this occurred if
  147. invoked as in the example below:
  148. tar tf archive.tar | head -n 1
  149. ** --remove-files
  150. 'tar --remove-files' failed to remove a directory which contained
  151. symlinks to another files within that directory.
  152. ** --test-label behavior
  153. In case of a mismatch, 'tar --test-label LABEL' exits with code 1,
  154. not 2 as it did in previous versions.
  155. The '--verbose' option used with '--test-label' provides additional
  156. diagnostics.
  157. Several volume labels may be specified in a command line, e.g.:
  158. tar --test-label -f archive 'My volume' 'New volume' 'Test volume'
  159. In this case, tar exits with code 0 if any one of the arguments
  160. matches the actual volume label.
  161. ** --label used with --update
  162. The '--label' option can be used with '--update' to prevent accidental
  163. update of an archive:
  164. tar -rf archive --label 'My volume' .
  165. This did not work in previous versions, in spite of what the docs said.
  166. ** --record-size and --tape-length (-L) options
  167. Usual size suffixes are allowed for these options. For example,
  168. -L10k stands for a 10 kilobyte tape length.
  169. ** Fix dead loop on extracting existing symlinks with the -k option.
  170. version 1.23 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-03-10
  171. * Record size autodetection
  172. When listing or extracting archives, the actual record size is
  173. reported only if the archive is read from a device (as opposed
  174. to regular files and pipes).
  175. * Seekable archives
  176. When a read-only operation (e.g. --list or --extract) is requested
  177. on a regular file, tar attemtps to speed up accesses by using lseek.
  178. * New command line option '--warning'
  179. The '--warning' command line option allows to suppress or enable
  180. particular warning messages during 'tar' run. It takes a single
  181. argument (a 'keyword'), identifying the class of warning messages
  182. to affect. If the argument is prefixed with 'no-', such warning
  183. messages are suppressed. For example,
  184. tar --warning=no-alone-zero-block -x -f archive
  185. suppresses the output of "A lone zero block" diagnostics, which is
  186. normally issued if 'archive' ends with a single block of zeros.
  187. See Tar Manual, section 3.9 "Controlling Warning Messages", for a
  188. detailed discussion.
  189. * New command line option '--level'
  190. The '--level=N' option sets the incremental dump level N. It
  191. is valid when used in conjunction with the -c and --listed-incremental
  192. options. So far the only meaningful value for N is 0. The
  193. '--level=0' option forces creating the level 0 dump, by truncating
  194. the snapshot file if it exists.
  195. * Files removed during incremental dumps
  196. If a file or directory is removed while incremental dump is
  197. in progress, tar exact actions depend on whether this file
  198. was explicitly listed in the command line, or was found
  199. during file system scan.
  200. If the file was explicitly listed in the command line, tar
  201. issues error message and exits with the code 2, meaning
  202. fatal error.
  203. Otherwise, if the file was found during the file system scan,
  204. tar issues a warning, saying "File removed before we read it",
  205. and sets exit code to 1, which means "some files differ".
  206. If the --warning=no-file-removed option is given, no warning
  207. is issued and exit code remains 0.
  208. * Modification times of PAX extended headers.
  209. Modification times in ustar header blocks of extended headers
  210. are set to mtimes of the corresponding archive members. This
  211. can be overridden by the
  212. --pax-opion='exthdr.mtime=STRING'
  213. command line option. The STRING is either number of seconds since
  214. the Epoch or a "Time reference" (see below).
  215. Modification times in ustar header blocks of global extended
  216. headers are set to the time when tar was invoked.
  217. This can be overridden by the
  218. --pax-opion='globexthdr.mtime=STRING'
  219. command line option. The STRING is either number of seconds since
  220. the Epoch or a "Time reference" (see below).
  221. * Time references in --pax-option argument.
  222. Any value from the --pax-option argument that is enclosed in a pair
  223. of curly braces represents a time reference. The string between the
  224. braces is understood either as a textual time representation, as described in
  225. chapter 7, "Date input formats", of the Tar manual, or as a name of
  226. an existing file, starting with '/' or '.'. In the latter
  227. case, it is replaced with the modification time of that file.
  228. * Environment of --to-command script.
  229. The environment passed to the --to-command script is extended with
  230. the following variables:
  231. TAR_VERSION GNU tar version number
  232. TAR_ARCHIVE The name of the archive
  233. TAR_VOLUME Ordinal number of the volume
  234. TAR_FORMAT Format of the archive
  235. TAR_BLOCKING_FACTOR Current blocking factor
  236. * Bugfixes
  237. ** Fix handling of hard link targets by -c --transform.
  238. ** Fix hard links recognition with -c --remove-files.
  239. ** Fix restoring files from backup (debian bug #508199).
  240. ** Correctly restore modes and permissions on existing directories.
  241. ** The --remove-files option removes files only if they were
  242. succesfully stored in the archive.
  243. ** Fix storing and listing of the volume labels in POSIX format.
  244. ** Improve algorithm for splitting long file names (ustar
  245. format).
  246. ** Fix possible memory overflow in the rmt client code (CVE-2010-0624).
  247. version 1.22 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2009-03-05
  248. * Support for xz compression
  249. Tar uses xz for compression if one of the following conditions is met:
  250. 1. The option --xz or -J (see below) is used.
  251. 2. The xz binary is set as compressor using --use-compress-program option.
  252. 3. The file name of the archive being created ends in '.xz' and
  253. auto-compress option (-a) is used.
  254. Xz is used for decompression if one of the following conditions is met:
  255. 1. The option --xz or -J is used.
  256. 2. The xz binary is set as compressor using --use-compress-program option.
  257. 3. The file is recognized as xz compressed stream data.
  258. * Short option -J reassigned as a short equivalent of --xz
  259. * New option -I
  260. The -I option is assigned as a short equivalent for
  261. --use-compress-program.
  262. * The --no-recursive option works in incremental mode.
  263. version 1.21 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2008-12-27
  264. * New short option -J
  265. A shortcut for --lzma.
  266. * New option --lzop
  267. * New option --no-auto-compress
  268. Cancels the effect of previous --auto-compress (-a) option.
  269. * New option --no-null
  270. Cancels the effect of previous --null option.
  271. * Compressed format recognition
  272. If tar is unable to determine archive compression format, it falls
  273. back to using archive suffix to determine it.
  274. * VCS support.
  275. Using --exclude-vcs handles also files used internally by Bazaar,
  276. Mercurial and Darcs.
  277. * Transformation scope flags
  278. Name transformation expressions understand additional flags that
  279. control type of archive members affected by them. The flags are:
  280. - r
  281. Apply transformation to regular archive members.
  282. - s
  283. Apply transformation to symbolic link targets.
  284. - h
  285. Apply transformation to hard link targets.
  286. Corresponding upper-case letters negate the meaning, so that
  287. 'H' means "do not apply transformation to hard link targets".
  288. The scope flags are listed in the third part of an 's' expression,
  289. e.g.:
  290. tar --transform 's|^|/usr/local/|S'
  291. Default is 'rsh', which means that transformations are applied to
  292. both regular archive members and to the targets of symbolic and hard
  293. links. If several transform expressions are used, the default flags
  294. can be changed using 'flags=' statement before the expressions, e.g.:
  295. tar --transform 'flags=S;s|^|/usr/local/|S'
  296. * Bugfixes
  297. ** The --null option disabled handling of tar options in list files. This
  298. is fixed.
  299. ** Fixed record size autodetection. If the detected record size differs from
  300. the expected value (either default one, or the one set from the
  301. command line), tar always prints a warning if verbosity level is set
  302. to 1 or greater, i.e. if either -t or -v option is given.
  303. version 1.20 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2008-04-14
  304. * New option --auto-compress (-a)
  305. With --create, selects compression algorithm basing on the suffix
  306. of the archive file name.
  307. * New option --lzma
  308. Selects LZMA compression algorithm
  309. * New option --hard-dereference
  310. During archive creation, dereferences hard links and stores the files
  311. they refer to, instead of creating usual hard link members (type '1').
  312. * New option --checkpoint-action
  313. This action allows to specify an action to be executed upon hitting a
  314. checkpoint. Recognized actions are: dot, echo (the default),
  315. echo=string, ttyout=string, exec=cmdline, and sleep=value. Any number
  316. of '--checkpoint-action' options can be specified, the actions will be
  317. executed in order of their appearance in the command line. See
  318. chapter 3.8 "Checkpoints" for a complete description.
  319. * New options --no-check-device, --check-device.
  320. The '--no-check-device' option disables comparing device numbers during
  321. preparatory stage of an incremental dump. This allows to avoid
  322. creating full dumps if the device numbers change (e.g. when using an
  323. LVM snapshot).
  324. The '--check-device' option enables comparing device numbers. This is
  325. the default. This option is provided to undo the effect of the previous
  326. '--no-check-device' option, e.g. if it was set in TAR_OPTIONS
  327. environment variable.
  328. * The --transform option.
  329. Any number of '--transform' options can be given in the command line.
  330. The specified transformations will be applied in turn.
  331. The argument to '--transform' option can be a list of replace
  332. expressions, separated by a semicolon (as in 'sed').
  333. Filename transformations are applied to symbolic link targets
  334. during both creation and extraction. Tar 1.19 used them only
  335. during extraction.
  336. For a detailed description, see chapter 6.7 "Modifying File and Member
  337. Names".
  338. * Info (end-of-volume) scripts
  339. The value of the blocking factor is made available to info and
  340. checkpoint scripts via environment variable TAR_BLOCKING_FACTOR.
  341. * Incremental archives
  342. Improved (sped up) extracting from incremental archives.
  343. * Bugfixes.
  344. ** Fix bug introduced in version 1.19: tar refused to update non-existing
  345. archives.
  346. version 1.19 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2007-10-10
  347. * New option --exclude-vcs
  348. Excludes directories and files, created by several widely used version
  349. control systems, e.g. "CVS/", ".svn/", etc.
  350. * --exclude-tag and --exclude-cache options
  351. The following options now work with incremental archives as well:
  352. --exclude-caches
  353. --exclude-caches-all
  354. --exclude-tag
  355. --exclude-tag-all
  356. --exclude-tag-under
  357. * Fix handling of renamed files in listed incremental archives.
  358. Previous versions always stored absolute file names in rename
  359. records, even if -P was not used. This is fixed: rename records
  360. contain file names processed in accordance with the command line
  361. settings.
  362. * Fix --version output.
  363. * Recognition of broken archives.
  364. When supplied an archive smaller than 512 bytes in reading mode (-x,
  365. -t), the previous version of tar silently ignored it, exiting with
  366. code 0. It is fixed. Tar now issues the following diagnostic message:
  367. 'This does not look like a tar archive', and exits with code 2.
  368. * Fix double-dot recognition in archive member names in case of duplicate '/.'.
  369. * Fix file padding in case of truncation of the input file to zero size.
  370. version 1.18 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2007-06-29
  371. * Licensed under the GPLv3
  372. * Fixed several bugs in the testsuite
  373. version 1.17 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2007-06-08
  374. * Fix archivation of sparse files in posix mode. Previous versions padded
  375. sparse members with spurious zero blocks.
  376. * Fix operation of --verify --listed-incremental. Version 1.16.1 produced
  377. a full dump when both options were given.
  378. * Fix --occurrence. In previous versions it continued scanning the archive
  379. even though all requested members has already been extracted.
  380. * Scope of --transform and --strip-components options.
  381. In addition to affecting regular archive members, the --transform
  382. option affects hard and soft link targets and the --strip-components
  383. option affects hard link targets as well.
  384. * End-of-volume script can send the new volume name to tar by writing
  385. it to the file descriptor stored in the environment variable TAR_FD.
  386. version 1.16.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-12-09
  387. * New option --exclude-tag allows to specify "exclusion tag files", i.e.
  388. files whose presence in a directory means that the directory should not
  389. be archived.
  390. * The --exclude-cache option excludes directories that contain the
  391. CACHEDIR.TAG file from being archived. Previous versions excluded
  392. directory contents only, while the directories themselves were
  393. still added to the archive.
  394. * Support for reading ustar type 'N' header logical records has been removed.
  395. This GNU extension was generated only by very old versions of GNU 'tar'.
  396. Unfortunately its implementation had security holes; see
  397. <http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2006-11/0344.html>.
  398. We don't expect that any tar archives in practical use have type 'N'
  399. records, but if you have one and you trust its contents, you can
  400. decode it with GNU tar 1.16 or earlier.
  401. * Race conditions have been fixed that in some cases briefly allowed
  402. files extracted by 'tar -x --same-owner' (or plain 'tar -x', when
  403. running as root) to be accessed by users that they shouldn't have been.
  404. version 1.16 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-10-21
  405. * After creating an archive, tar exits with code 1 if some files were
  406. changed while being read. Previous versions exited with code 2 (fatal
  407. error), and only if some files were truncated while being archived.
  408. * New option --mtime allows to set modification times for all archive
  409. members during creation.
  410. * Bug fixes
  411. ** Avoid running off file descriptors when using multiple -C options.
  412. ** tar --index-file=FILE --file=- sent the archive to FILE, and
  413. the listing to stderr.
  414. version 1.15.91 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-06-16
  415. * Incompatible changes
  416. ** Globbing
  417. Previous versions of GNU tar assumed shell-style globbing when
  418. extracting from or listing an archive. For example:
  419. tar xf foo.tar '*.c'
  420. would extract all files whose names end in '.c'. This behavior
  421. was not documented and was incompatible with traditional tar
  422. implementations. Therefore, starting from this version, GNU tar
  423. no longer uses globbing by default. For example, the above invocation
  424. is now interpreted as a request to extract from the archive the file
  425. named '*.c'.
  426. To treat member names as globbing patterns, use --wildcards option.
  427. If you wish tar to mimic the behavior of versions up to 1.15.90,
  428. add --wildcards to the value of the environment variable TAR_OPTIONS.
  429. The exact way in which tar interprets member names is controlled by the
  430. following command line options:
  431. --wildcards use wildcards
  432. --anchored patterns match file name start
  433. --ignore-case ignore case
  434. --wildcards-match-slash wildcards match '/'
  435. Each of these options has a '--no-' counterpart that disables its
  436. effect (e.g. --no-wildcards).
  437. These options affect both the interpretation of member names from
  438. command line and that of the exclusion patterns (given with --exclude
  439. and --exclude-from options). The defaults are:
  440. 1. For member names: --no-wildcards --anchored
  441. 2. For exclusion patterns: --wildcards --no-anchored --wildcards-match-slash
  442. The options can appear multiple times in the command line, thereby
  443. changing the way command line arguments are interpreted. For example,
  444. to use case-insensitive matching in exclude patterns and to revert to
  445. case-sensitive matching for the rest of command line, one could write:
  446. tar xf foo.tar --ignore-case --exclude-from=FILE --no-ignore-case file.name
  447. ** Short option -l is now an alias of --check-links option, which complies
  448. with UNIX98. This ends the transition period started with version 1.14.
  449. * New features
  450. ** New option --transform allows to transform file names before storing them
  451. in the archive or member names before extracting. The option takes a
  452. sed replace expression as its argument. For example,
  453. tar cf foo.tar --transform 's,^,prefix/,'
  454. will add 'prefix/' to all file names stored in foo.tar.
  455. ** --strip-components option works when deleting and comparing. In previous
  456. versions it worked only with --extract.
  457. ** New option --show-transformed-names enables display of transformed file
  458. or archive. It generalizes --show-stored-names option, introduced in
  459. 1.15.90. In particular, when creating an archive in verbose mode, it lists
  460. member names as stored in the archive, i.e., with any eventual prefixes
  461. removed and file name transformations applied. The option is useful,
  462. for example, while comparing 'tar cv' and 'tar tv' outputs.
  463. ** New incremental snapshot file format keeps information about file names
  464. as well as that about directories.
  465. ** The --checkpoint option takes an optional argument specifying the number
  466. of records between the two successive checkpoints. Optional dot
  467. starting the argument intructs tar to print dots instead of textual
  468. checkpoints.
  469. ** The --totals option can be used with any tar operation (previous versions
  470. understood it only with --create). If an argument to this option is
  471. given, it specifies the signal upon delivery of which the statistics
  472. is to be printed. Both forms of this option (with and without
  473. argument) can be given to in a single invocation of tar.
  474. * Bug fixes
  475. ** Detect attempts to update compressed archives.
  476. version 1.15.90 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-02-19
  477. * New features
  478. ** Any number of -T (--files-from) options may be used in the command line.
  479. The file specified with -T may include any valid 'tar' options,
  480. including another -T option.
  481. Compatibility note: older versions of tar would only recognize -C
  482. as an option name within the file list file. Now any file whose name
  483. starts with - is handled as an option. To insert file names starting with
  484. dash, use the --add-file option.
  485. ** List files containing null-separated file names are detected and processed
  486. automatically. It is no longer necessary to give the --null option.
  487. ** New option --no-unquote disables the unquoting of input file names.
  488. This is useful for processing output from 'find dir -print0'.
  489. An orthogonal option --unquote is provided as well.
  490. ** New option --test-label tests the archive volume label.
  491. If an argument is specified, the label is compared against its value.
  492. Tar exits with code 0 if the two strings match, and with code 2 if
  493. they do not.
  494. If no argument is given, the --verbose option is implied. In this case,
  495. tar prints the label name if present and exits with code 0.
  496. ** New option --show-stored-names. When creating an archive in verbose mode,
  497. it lists member names as stored in the archive, i.e., with any eventual
  498. prefixes removed. The option is useful, for example, while comparing
  499. 'tar cv' and 'tar tv' outputs.
  500. ** New option --to-command pipes the contents of archive members to the
  501. specified command.
  502. ** New option --atime-preserve=system, which uses the O_NOATIME feature
  503. of recent Linux kernels to avoid some problems when preserving file
  504. access times.
  505. ** New option --delay-directory-restore delays restoring modification times
  506. and permissions of extracted directories until the end of extraction.
  507. This is necessary for restoring from archives with unusual member
  508. ordering (in particular, those created with --no-recursion option).
  509. This option is implied when restoring from incremental archives.
  510. ** New option --restrict prohibits use of some potentially harmful tar
  511. options. Currently it disables '!' escape in multi-volume name menu.
  512. ** New options --quoting-style and --quote-chars control the way tar
  513. quotes member names on output. The --quoting-style takes an argument
  514. specifying the quoting style to use (literal, shell, shell-always,
  515. c, escape, locale, clocale). The argument to --quote-chars is a string
  516. specifying characters to quote, even if the selected quoting style
  517. would not quote them otherwise. The option --no-quote-chars is
  518. provided to disable quoting certain characters.
  519. ** The end-of-volume script (introduced with --info-script option) can
  520. get current archive name from the environment variable TAR_ARCHIVE and
  521. the volume number from the variable TAR_VOLUME. It can alter the
  522. archive name by writing new name to the file descriptor 3.
  523. ** Better support for full-resolution time stamps. Tar cannot restore
  524. time stamps to full nanosecond resolution, though, until the kernel
  525. guys get their act together and give us a system call to set file time
  526. stamps to nanosecond resolution.
  527. ** The -v option now prints time stamps only to 1-minute resolution,
  528. not full resolution, to avoid using up too many output columns.
  529. Nanosecond resolution is now supported, but that would be too much.
  530. * Bug fixes
  531. ** Allow non-option arguments to be interspersed with options.
  532. ** When extracting or listing archives in old GNU format, tar
  533. used to read an extra block of data after a long name header
  534. if length of the member name was divisible by block size (512).
  535. Consequently, the file pointer was set off and the next member
  536. was not processed correctly.
  537. ** Previous version created invalid archives when files shrink
  538. during reading.
  539. ** Compare mode (tar d) hung when trying to compare file contents.
  540. ** Previous versions in certain cases failed to restore directory
  541. modification times.
  542. ** When creating an archive, do not attempt to store files whose
  543. meta-data cannot be stored in the header due to format limitations
  544. (for ustar and v7 formats).
  545. ** The --version option now also outputs information about copyright,
  546. license, and credits. This reverts to the behavior of tar 1.14 and
  547. earlier, and conforms to the GNU coding standards. The --license (-L)
  548. option introduced in tar 1.15 has been removed, since it's no longer
  549. needed.
  550. version 1.15.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-12-21
  551. This version fixes a bug introduced in 1.15 which caused
  552. tar to refuse to extract files from standard input.
  553. version 1.15 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-12-20
  554. * Compressed archives are recognised automatically, it is no longer
  555. necessary to specify -Z, -z, or -j options to read them. Thus, you can
  556. now run 'tar tf archive.tar.gz'.
  557. * When restoring incremental dumps, --one-file-system option
  558. prevents directory hierarchies residing on different devices
  559. from being purged.
  560. With the previous versions of tar it was dangerous to create
  561. incremental dumps with --one-file-system option, since they
  562. would recursively remove mount points when restoring from the
  563. back up. This change fixes the bug.
  564. * Renamed --strip-path to --strip-components for consistency with
  565. the GNU convention.
  566. * Skipping archive members is sped up if the archive media supports
  567. seeks.
  568. * Restore script starts restoring only if it is given --all (-a) option,
  569. or some patterns. This is to prevent accidental restores.
  570. * 'tar --verify' prints a warning if during archive creation some of
  571. the file names had their prefixes stripped off.
  572. * New option --exclude-caches instructs tar to exclude cache directories
  573. automatically on archive creation. Cache directories are those
  574. containing a standardized tag file, as specified at:
  575. http://www.brynosaurus.com/cachedir/spec.html
  576. * New configure option --with-rmt allows to specify full path name to
  577. the 'rmt' utility. This supersedes DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND variable
  578. introduced in version 1.14
  579. * New configure variable DEFAULT_RMT_DIR allows to specify the directory
  580. where to install 'rmt' utility. This is necessary since modifying
  581. --libexecdir as was suggested for version 1.14 produced a side effect: it
  582. also modified installation prefix for backup scripts (if
  583. --enable-backup-scripts was given).
  584. * Bug fixes:
  585. ** Fixed flow in recognizing files to be included in incremental dumps.
  586. ** Correctly recognize sparse archive members when used with -T option.
  587. ** GNU multivolume headers cannot store filenames longer than 100 characters.
  588. Do not allow multivolume archives to begin with such filenames.
  589. ** If a member with link count > 2 was stored in the archive twice,
  590. previous versions of tar were not able to extract it, since they
  591. were trying to link the file to itself, which always failed and
  592. lead to removing the already extracted copy. Preserve the first
  593. extracted copy in such cases.
  594. ** Restore script was passing improper argument to tar --listed option (which
  595. didn't affect the functionality, but was logically incorrect).
  596. ** Fixed verification of created archives.
  597. ** Fixed unquoting of file names containing backslash escapes (previous
  598. versions failed to recognize \a and \v).
  599. ** When attempting to delete a non-existing member from the archive, previous
  600. versions of tar used to overwrite last archive block with zeroes.
  601. version 1.14 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-05-11
  602. * Added support for POSIX.1-2001 and ustar archive formats.
  603. * New option --format allows to select the output archive format
  604. * The default output format can be selected at configuration time
  605. by presetting the environment variable DEFAULT_ARCHIVE_FORMAT.
  606. Allowed values are GNU, V7, OLDGNU and POSIX.
  607. * New option --strip-path allows to cut off a given number of
  608. path elements from the name of the file being extracted.
  609. * New options --index-file, --no-overwrite-dir. The --overwrite-dir
  610. option is now the default; use --no-overwrite-dir if you prefer
  611. the previous default behavior.
  612. * The semantics of -o option is changed. When extracting, it
  613. does the same as --no-same-owner GNU tar option. This is compatible
  614. with UNIX98 tar. Otherwise, its effect is the same as that of
  615. --old-archive option. This latter is deprecated and will be removed
  616. in future.
  617. * New option --check-links prints a message if not all links are dumped
  618. for a file being archived. This corresponds to the UNIX98 -l option.
  619. The current semantics of the -l option is retained for compatibility
  620. with previous releases, however such usage is strongly deprecated as
  621. the option will change to its UNIX98 semantics in the future releases.
  622. * New option --occurrence[=N] can be used in conjunction with one of
  623. the subcommands --delete, --diff, --extract or --list when a list of
  624. files is given either on the command line or via -T option. This
  625. option instructs tar to process only the Nth occurrence of each named
  626. file. N defaults to 1, so 'tar -x -f archive --occurrence filename'
  627. extracts the first occurrence of 'filename' from 'archive'
  628. and terminates without scanning to the end of the archive.
  629. * New option --pax-option allows to control the handling of POSIX
  630. keywords in 'pax' extended headers. It is equivalent to 'pax'
  631. -o option.
  632. * --incremental and --listed-incremental options work correctly on
  633. individual files, as well as on directories.
  634. * New scripts: backup (replaces old level-0 and level-1) and restore.
  635. The scripts are compiled and installed if --enable-backup-scripts
  636. option is given to configure.
  637. * By default tar searches "rmt" utility in "$prefix/libexec/rmt",
  638. which is consistent with the location where the version of "rmt"
  639. included in the package is installed. Previous versions of tar
  640. used "/etc/rmt". To install "rmt" to its traditional location,
  641. run configure with option --libexecdir=/etc. Otherwise, if you
  642. already have rmt installed and wish to use it, instead of the
  643. shipped in version, set the variable DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND to
  644. the full path name of the utility, e.g., ./configure
  645. DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND=/etc/rmt.
  646. Notice also that the full path name of the "rmt" utility to
  647. use can be set at runtime, by giving option --rmt-command to
  648. tar.
  649. * Removed obsolete command line options:
  650. ** --absolute-paths superseded by --absolute-names
  651. ** --block-compress is not needed any longer
  652. ** --block-size superseded by --blocking-factor
  653. ** --modification-time superseded by --touch
  654. ** --read-full-blocks superseded by --read-full-records
  655. ** --record-number superseded by --block-number
  656. ** --version-control superseded by --backup
  657. * New message translations fi (Finnish), gl (Galician), hr (Croatian),
  658. hu (Hungarian), ms (Malaysian), nb (Norwegian), ro (Romanian), sk
  659. (Slovak), zh_CN (Chinese simplified), zh_TW (Chinese traditional).
  660. The code 'no' for Norwegian (Bokmål) has been withdrawn; use 'nb' instead.
  661. * Bug fixes.
  662. version 1.13.25 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-26
  663. * Bug fixes.
  664. version 1.13.24 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-22
  665. * New option --overwrite-dir.
  666. * Fixes for buffer overrun, porting, and copyright notice problems.
  667. * The message translations for Korean are available again.
  668. version 1.13.23 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-13
  669. * Bug, porting, and copyright notice fixes.
  670. version 1.13.22 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-29
  671. * Bug fixes.
  672. version 1.13.21 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-28
  673. * Porting and copyright notice fixes.
  674. version 1.13.20 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-27
  675. * Some bugs were fixed:
  676. - security problems
  677. - hard links to symbolic links
  678. * New option --recursion (the default) that is the inverse of --no-recursion.
  679. * New options --anchored, --ignore-case, --wildcards,
  680. --wildcards-match-slash, and their negations (e.g., --no-anchored).
  681. Along with --recursion and --no-recursion, these options control how
  682. exclude patterns are interpreted.
  683. * The default interpretation of exclude patterns is now --no-anchored
  684. --no-ignore-case --recursion --wildcards --wildcards-match-slash.
  685. This is a quiet change to the semantics of --exclude. The previous
  686. semantics were a failed attempt at backward compatibility but it
  687. became clear that the semantics were puzzling and did not satisfy
  688. everybody. Rather than continue to try to revive that dead horse we
  689. thought it better to substitute cleaner semantics, with options so
  690. that you can change the behavior more to your liking.
  691. * New message translations for Indonesian and Turkish.
  692. The translation for Korean has been withdrawn due to encoding errors.
  693. It will be reissued once those are fixed.
  694. version 1.13.19 - Paul Eggert, 2001-01-13
  695. * The -I option has been withdrawn, as it was buggy and confusing.
  696. Eventually it is planned to be reintroduced, with the same meaning as -T.
  697. * With an option like -N DATE, if DATE starts with "/" or ".", it is taken
  698. to be a file name; the last-modified time of that file is used as the date.
  699. version 1.13.18 - Paul Eggert, 2000-10-29
  700. * Some security problems have been fixed. 'tar -x' now modifies only
  701. files under the working directory, unless you also specify an unsafe
  702. option like --absolute-names or --overwrite.
  703. * The short name of the --bzip option has been changed to -j,
  704. and -I is now an alias for -T, for compatibility with Solaris tar.
  705. * The manual is now distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
  706. * The new environment variable TAR_OPTIONS holds default command-line options.
  707. * The --no-recursion option now affects extraction too.
  708. * The wording in some diagnostics has been changed slightly.
  709. * Snapshot files now record whether each file was accessed via NFS.
  710. The new file format is upward- and downward-compatible with the old.
  711. * New language supported: da.
  712. * Compilation by traditional (K&R) C compilers is no longer supported.
  713. If you still use such a compiler, please use GCC instead.
  714. * This version of tar works best with GNU gzip test version 1.3 or later.
  715. Please see <ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gzip/>.
  716. * 'tar --delete -f -' now works again.
  717. version 1.13.17 - Paul Eggert, 2000-01-07.
  718. * 'tar --delete -f -' is no longer allowed; it was too buggy.
  719. * Diagnostic messages have been made more regular and consistent.
  720. version 1.13.16 - Paul Eggert, 1999-12-13.
  721. * By default, tar now refuses to overwrite an existing file when
  722. extracting files from an archive; instead, it removes the file
  723. before extracting it. If the existing file is a symbolic link, the
  724. link is removed and not the pointed-to file. There is one
  725. exception: existing nonempty directories are not removed, nor are
  726. their ownerships or permissions extracted. This fixes some
  727. longstanding security problems.
  728. The new --overwrite option enables the old default behavior.
  729. For regular files, tar implements this change by using the O_EXCL
  730. option of 'open' to ensure that it creates the file; if this fails, it
  731. removes the file and tries again. This is similar to the behavior of
  732. the --unlink-first option, but it is faster in the common case of
  733. extracting a new directory.
  734. * By default, tar now ignores file names containing a component of '..'
  735. when extracting, and warns about such file names when creating an archive.
  736. To enable the old behavior, use the -P or --absolute-names option.
  737. * Tar now handles file names with multibyte encodings (e.g., UTF-8, Shift-JIS)
  738. correctly. It relies on the mbrtowc function to handle multibyte characters.
  739. * The file generated by -g or --listed-incremental now uses a format
  740. that is independent of locale, so that users need not worry about
  741. locale when restoring a backup. This is needed for proper support
  742. of multibyte characters. Old-format files can still be read, and
  743. older versions of GNU tar can read new-format files, unless member
  744. names have multibyte chars.
  745. * Many diagnostics have been changed slightly, so that file names are
  746. now output unambiguously. File names in diagnostics now are either
  747. `quoted like this' (in the default C locale) or are followed by
  748. colon, newline, or space, depending on context. Unprintable
  749. characters are escaped with a C-like backslash conventions.
  750. Terminating characters (e.g., close-quote, colon, newline)
  751. are also escaped as needed.
  752. * tar now ignores socket files when creating an archive.
  753. Previously tar archived sockets as fifos, which caused problems.
  754. version 1.13.15 - Paul Eggert, 1999-12-03.
  755. * If a file's ctime changes when being archived, report an error.
  756. Previously tar looked at mtime, which missed some errors.
  757. version 1.13.14 - Paul Eggert, 1999-11-07.
  758. * New translations ja, pt_BR.
  759. * New options --help and --version for rmt.
  760. * Ignore Solaris door files when creating an archive.
  761. version 1.13.13 - Paul Eggert, 1999-10-11.
  762. * Invalid headers in tar files now elicit errors, not just warnings.
  763. * 'tar --version' output conforms to the latest GNU coding standards.
  764. * If you specify an invalid date, 'tar' now substitutes (time_t) -1.
  765. * 'configure --with-dmalloc' is no longer available.
  766. version 1.13.12 - Paul Eggert, 1999-09-24.
  767. * 'tar' now supports hard links to symbolic links.
  768. * New options --no-same-owner, --no-same-permissions.
  769. * --total now also outputs a human-readable size, and a throughput value.
  770. * 'tar' now uses two's-complement base-256 when outputting header
  771. values that are out of the range of the standard unsigned base-8
  772. format. This affects archive members with negative or huge time
  773. stamps or uids, and archive members 8 GB or larger. The new tar
  774. archives cannot be read by traditional tar, or by older versions of
  775. GNU tar. Use the --old-archive option to revert to the old
  776. behavior, which uses unportable representations for negative values,
  777. and which rejects large files.
  778. * On 32-bit hosts, 'tar' now assumes that an incoming time stamp T in
  779. the range 2**31 <= T < 2**32 represents the negative time (T -
  780. 2**32). This behavior is nonstandard and is not portable to 64-bit
  781. time_t hosts, so 'tar' issues a warning.
  782. * 'tar' no longer gives up extracting immediately upon discovering
  783. that an archive contains garbage at the end. It attempts to extract
  784. as many files as possible from the good data before the garbage.
  785. * A read error now causes a nonzero exit status, not just a warning.
  786. * Some diagnostics have been reworded for consistency.
  787. version 1.13.11 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-23.
  788. * The short name of the --bzip option has been changed to -I,
  789. for compatibility with paxutils.
  790. * -T /dev/null now matches nothing; previously, it matched anything
  791. if no explicit operands were given.
  792. * The '--' option now works the same as with other GNU utilities;
  793. it causes later operands to be interpreted as file names, not options,
  794. even if they begin with '-'.
  795. * For the --newer and --after-date options, the table of time zone
  796. abbreviations like 'EST' has been updated to match current practice.
  797. Also, local time abbreviations are now recognized, even if they are
  798. not in tar's hardwired table. Remember, though, that you should use
  799. numeric UTC offsets like '-0500' instead of abbreviations like
  800. 'EST', as abbreviations are not standardized and are ambiguous.
  801. version 1.13.10 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-20.
  802. * 'tar' now uses signed base-64 when outputting header values that are
  803. out of the range of the standard unsigned base-8 format. [This
  804. change was superseded in 1.13.12, described above.]
  805. version 1.13.9 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-18.
  806. * 'tar' now writes two zero blocks at end-of-archive instead of just one.
  807. POSIX.1 requires this, and some other 'tar' implementations check for it.
  808. * 'tar' no longer silently accepts a block containing nonzero checksum bytes
  809. as a zero block.
  810. * 'tar' now reads buggy tar files that have a null byte at the start of a
  811. numeric header field.
  812. version 1.13.8 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-16.
  813. * For compatibility with traditional 'tar', intermediate directories
  814. created automatically by root are no longer given the uid and gid of
  815. the original file or directory.
  816. version 1.13.7 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-14.
  817. * --listed-incremental and --newer are now incompatible options.
  818. * When creating an archive, leading './' is no longer stripped,
  819. to match traditional tar's behavior (and simplify the documentation).
  820. * --diff without --absolute-names no longer falls back on absolute names.
  821. version 1.13.6 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-11.
  822. * An --exclude pattern containing / now excludes a file only if it matches an
  823. initial prefix of the file name; a pattern without / continues to
  824. exclude a file if it matches any file name component.
  825. * The protocol for talking to rmt has been extended slightly.
  826. Open flags are now communicated in symbolic format as well as numeric.
  827. The symbolic format (e.g., "O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC") is for portability
  828. when rmt is operating on a different operating system from tar.
  829. The numeric format is retained, and rmt uses it if symbolic format is absent,
  830. for backward compatibility with older versions of tar and rmt.
  831. * When writing GNU tar format headers, tar now uses signed base-64
  832. for values that cannot be represented in unsigned octal.
  833. This supports larger files (2**66 - 1 bytes instead of 2**33 - 1 bytes),
  834. larger uids, negative time stamps, etc.
  835. * When extracting files with unknown ownership, tar now looks up the
  836. uid and gid "nobody" on hosts whose headers do not define UID_NOBODY
  837. and GID_NOBODY, and falls back on uid/gid -2 if there is no "nobody".
  838. * tar -t --numeric-owner now prints numeric uids and gids, not symbolic.
  839. * New option -y or --bzip2 for bzip2 compression, by popular request.
  840. version 1.13.5 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-20.
  841. * Do the delayed updates of file metadata even after a fatal error.
  842. version 1.13.4 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-20.
  843. * Do not chmod unless we are root or the -p option was given;
  844. this matches historical practice.
  845. version 1.13.3 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-16.
  846. * A path name is excluded if any of its file name components matches an
  847. excluded pattern, even if the path name was specified on the command line.
  848. Also see 1.13.6 for later changes in this area.
  849. version 1.13.2 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-14.
  850. * Bug reporting address changed to <bug-tar@gnu.org>.
  851. version 1.13.1 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-12.
  852. * Bug fixes only.
  853. version 1.13 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-08.
  854. * Support for large files, e.g., files larger than 2 GB on many 32-bit hosts.
  855. Also, support for larger uids, device ids, etc.
  856. * Many bug fixes and porting fixes.
  857. * This release is only for fixes. A more ambitious test release,
  858. with new features, is available as part of the paxutils. Please see:
  859. ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/paxutils/
  860. The fixes in this release are intended to be merged with paxutils
  861. at some point, but they haven't been merged yet.
  862. * An interim GNU tar alpha had new --bzip2 and --ending-file options,
  863. but they have been removed to maintain compatibility with paxutils.
  864. Please try --use=bzip2 instead of --bzip2.
  865. Version 1.12 - François Pinard, 1997-04.
  866. Sensitive matters
  867. * Use shell globbing patterns for --label, instead of regular expressions.
  868. * Do not quote anymore internally over the quoting done by the shell.
  869. Output for humans
  870. * Offer internationalization capabilities of most recent GNU gettext.
  871. * Messages available in many more languages, thanks to all translators!
  872. * Usage of ISO 8601 dates in listings, instead of local American dates.
  873. * More normalization and cleanup in error messages.
  874. Creation
  875. * For helping using tar with find, offer a --no-recursion option.
  876. * Implement --numeric-owner for ignoring symbolic names at create time.
  877. * New --owner, --group --mode options, still preliminary.
  878. * Recognize creating an archive on /dev/null, so Amanda works faster.
  879. * Object to the creation of an empty archive (like in 'tar cf FILE').
  880. * Barely start implementing --posix and POSIXLY_CORRECT.
  881. Extraction
  882. * Make a better job at restoring file and directory attributes.
  883. * Automatically attempt deleting existing files when in the way.
  884. * Option --unlink-first (-U) removes most files prior to extraction.
  885. * Option --recursive-unlink removes non-empty directories when in the way.
  886. * Option --numeric-owner ignores owner/group names, it uses UID/GID instead.
  887. * Use global umask when creating missing intermediate directories.
  888. * When symlinks are not available, extract symbolic links as hard links.
  889. * Diagnose extraction of contiguous files as regular files.
  890. * New --backup, --suffix and --version-control options.
  891. Various changes
  892. * Better support of huge archives with --tape-length and --totals.
  893. * Rename option --read-full-blocks (-B) to --read-full-records (-B).
  894. * Rename option --block-size (-b) to --blocking-factor (-b).
  895. * Rename option --record-number (-R) to --block-number (-R).
  896. * With --block-number (-R), report null blocks and end of file.
  897. * Implement --record-size for introducing a size in bytes.
  898. * Delete --block-compress option and rather decide it automatically.
  899. * Rename option --modification-time to --touch.
  900. Many bugs are squashed, while others still run free.
  901. Version 1.11.8 - François Pinard, 1995-06.
  902. * Messages available in French, German, Portuguese and Swedish.
  903. * The distribution provides a rudimentary Texinfo manual.
  904. * The device defaults to stdin/stdout, unless overridden by the installer.
  905. * Option --sparse (-S) should work on more systems.
  906. * Option --rsh-command may select an alternative remote shell program.
  907. Most changes are internal, and should yield better portability.
  908. Version 1.11.2 - Michael Bushnell, 1993-03.
  909. * Changes in backup scripts: cleaned up considerably; notices error
  910. conditions better over rsh; DUMP_REMIND_SCRIPT is now an option in
  911. backup-specs; new file dump-remind is an example of a
  912. DUMP_REMIND_SCRIPT.
  913. * Superfluous "Reading dirname" was a bug; fixed.
  914. * Incompatibility problems with a bug on Solaris are fixed.
  915. * New option --gzip (aliases are --ungzip and -z); calls gzip instead
  916. of compress. Also, --use-compress-program lets you specify any
  917. compress program. --compress-block is renamed --block-compress and
  918. now requires one of the three compression options to be specified.
  919. * Several error messages are cleaned up.
  920. * Directory owners are now set properly when running as root.
  921. * Provide DUMP_REMIND_SCRIPT in backup-specs as a possible option
  922. for --info-script.
  923. * Behave better with broken rmt servers.
  924. * Dump scripts no longer use --atime-preserve; this causes a nasty probem.
  925. * Several Makefile cleanups.
  926. Version 1.11.1 - Michael Bushnell, 1992-09.
  927. * Many bug fixes.
  928. Version 1.11 - Michael Bushnell, 1992-09.
  929. Version 1.10.16 - 1992-07.
  930. Version 1.10.15 - 1992-06.
  931. Version 1.10.14 - 1992-05.
  932. Version 1.10.13 - 1992-01.
  933. * Many bug fixes.
  934. * Now uses GNU standard configure, generated by Autoconf.
  935. * Long options now use '--'; use of '+' is deprecated and support
  936. for it will eventually be removed.
  937. * New option --null causes filenames read by -T to be
  938. null-terminated, and causes -C to be ignored.
  939. * New option --remove-files deletes files (but not directories)
  940. after they are added to the archive.
  941. * New option --ignore-failed-read prevents read-errors from affecting
  942. the exit status.
  943. * New option --checkpoint prints occasional messages as the tape
  944. is being read or written.
  945. * New option --show-omitted-dirs prints the names of directories
  946. omitted from the archive.
  947. * Some tape drives which use a non-standard method of indicating
  948. end-of-tape now work correctly with multi-tape archives.
  949. * --volno-file: Read the volume number used in prompting the user
  950. (but not in recording volume ID's on the archive) from a file.
  951. * When using --multi-volume, you can now give multiple -f arguments;
  952. the various tape drives will get used in sequence and then wrap
  953. around to the beginning.
  954. * Remote archive names no longer have to be in /dev: any file with a
  955. ':' is interpreted as remote. If new option --force-local is given,
  956. then even archive files with a ':' are considered local.
  957. * New option --atime-preserve restores (if possible) atimes to
  958. their original values after dumping the file.
  959. * No longer does tar confusingly dump "." when you don't tell it
  960. what to dump.
  961. * When extracting directories, tar now correctly restores their
  962. modification and access times.
  963. * Longnames support is redone differently--long name info directly
  964. precedes the long-named file or link in the archive, so you no
  965. longer have to wait for the extract to hit the end of the tape for
  966. long names to work.
  967. Version 1.10 - Michael Bushnell, 1991-07.
  968. * Filename to -G is optional. -C works right. Names +newer and
  969. +newer-mtime work right.
  970. * -g is now +incremental, -G is now +listed-incremental.
  971. * Sparse files now work correctly.
  972. * +volume is now called +label.
  973. * +exclude now takes a filename argument, and +exclude-from does
  974. what +exclude used to do.
  975. * Exit status is now correct.
  976. * +totals keeps track of total I/O and prints it when tar exits.
  977. * When using +label with +extract, the label is now a regexp.
  978. * New option +tape-length (-L) does multi-volume handling like BSD
  979. dump: you tell tar how big the tape is and it will prompt at that
  980. point instead of waiting for a write error.
  981. * New backup scripts level-0 and level-1 which might be useful
  982. to people. They use a file "backup-specs" for information, and
  983. shouldn't need local modification. These are what we use to do
  984. all our backups at the FSF.
  985. Version 1.09 - Jay Fenlason, 1990-10.
  986. Version 1.08 - Jay Fenlason, 1990-01.
  987. Versions 1.07 back to 1.00 by Jay Fenlason.
  988. * See ChangeLog for more details.
  989. Copyright 1994-2001, 2003-2010, 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
  990. This file is part of GNU tar.
  991. GNU tar is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
  992. it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
  993. the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
  994. (at your option) any later version.
  995. GNU tar is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
  996. but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
  997. MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
  998. GNU General Public License for more details.
  999. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  1000. along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
  1001. Local variables:
  1002. mode: outline
  1003. paragraph-separate: "[ ]*$"
  1004. eval: (add-hook 'write-file-hooks 'time-stamp)
  1005. time-stamp-start: "changes. "
  1006. time-stamp-format: "%:y-%02m-%02d"
  1007. time-stamp-end: "\n"
  1008. end: