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  1. GNU tar NEWS - User visible changes. 2018-03-18
  2. Please send GNU tar bug reports to <[email protected]>
  3. version 1.30.90 (Git)
  4. * Support for zstd compression
  5. New option '--zstd' instructs tar to use zstd as compression program.
  6. When listing, extractng and comparing, zstd compressed archives are
  7. recognized automatically.
  8. When '-a' option is in effect, zstd compression is selected if the
  9. destination archive name ends in '.zst' or '.tzst'.
  10. version 1.30 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2017-12-17
  11. * Member names containing '..' components are now skipped when extracting.
  12. This fixes tar's behavior to match its documentation, and is a bit
  13. safer when extracting untrusted archives over old files (an unsafe
  14. practice that the tar manual has long recommended against).
  15. * Report erroneous use of position-sensitive options.
  16. During archive creation or update, tar keeps track of positional
  17. options (see the manual, subsection 3.4.4 "Position-Sensitive
  18. Options"), and reports those that had no effect. For example, when
  19. invoked as
  20. tar -cf a.tar . --exclude '*.o'
  21. tar will create the archive, but will exit with status 2, having
  22. issued the following error message
  23. tar: The following options were used after non-optional
  24. arguments in archive create or update mode. These options are
  25. positional and affect only arguments that follow them. Please,
  26. rearrange them properly.
  27. tar: --exclude '*.o' has no effect
  28. tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
  29. * --numeric-owner now affects private headers too.
  30. This helps the output of 'tar' to be more deterministic.
  31. * Fixed the --delay-directory-restore option
  32. In some cases tar would restore the directory permissions too early,
  33. causing subsequent link extractions in that directory to fail.
  34. * The --warnings=failed-read option
  35. This new warning control option suppresses warning messages about
  36. unreadable files and directories. It has effect only if used together
  37. with the --ignore-failed-read option.
  38. * The --warnings=none option now suppresses all warnings
  39. This includes warnings about unreadable files produced when
  40. --ignore-failed-read is in effect. To output these, use
  41. --warnings=none --warnings=no-failed-read.
  42. * Fix reporting of hardlink mismatches during compare
  43. Tar reported incorrect target file name in the 'Not linked to'
  44. diagnostic message.
  45. version 1.29 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2016-05-16
  46. * New options: --verbatim-files-from, --no-verbatim-files-from
  47. The --verbatim-files-from option instructs tar to treat each line read
  48. from a file list as a file name, even if it starts with a dash.
  49. File lists are supplied with the --files-from (-T) option. By
  50. default, each line read from a file list is first stripped off the
  51. leading and trailing whitespace and, if the result begins with a dash,
  52. it is treated as tar command line option.
  53. Use the --verbatim-files-from option to disable this special handling.
  54. This facilitates the use of tar with file lists created automatically
  55. (e.g. by find(1) command).
  56. This option affects all --files-from options that occur after it in
  57. the command line. Its effect is reverted by the
  58. --no-verbatim-files-from option.
  59. * --null option reads file names verbatim
  60. The --null option implies --verbatim-files-from. I.e. each line
  61. read from null-delimited file lists is treated as a file name.
  62. This restores the documented behavior, which was broken in version
  63. 1.27.
  64. * New options: --owner-map=FILE and --group-map=FILE
  65. These two options provide fine-grained control over what user/group
  66. names (or IDs) should be mapped when adding files to archive.
  67. For both options, FILE is a plain text file with user or group
  68. mappings. Empty lines are ignored. Comments are introduced with
  69. # sign (unless quoted) and extend to the end of the corresponding
  70. line. Each non-empty line defines translation for a single UID (GID).
  71. It must consist of two fields, delimited by any amount of whitespace:
  72. OLDNAME NEWNAME[:NEWID]
  73. OLDNAME is either a valid user (group) name or a ID prefixed with +. Unless
  74. NEWID is supplied, NEWNAME must also be either a valid name or a
  75. +ID. Otherwise, both NEWNAME and NEWID need not be listed in the
  76. system user database.
  77. * New option --clamp-mtime
  78. The new --clamp-mtime option changes the behavior of --mtime to only
  79. use the time specified if the file mtime is newer than the given time.
  80. The --clamp-mtime option can only be used together with --mtime.
  81. Typical use case is to make builds reproducible: to loose less
  82. information, it's better to keep the original date of an archive,
  83. except for files modified during the build process. In that case, using
  84. reference (and thus reproducible) timestamps for the latter is good
  85. enough.
  86. See <https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds> for more information.
  87. * Deprecated --preserve option removed
  88. * Sparse file detection
  89. Tar now uses SEEK_DATA/SEEK_HOLE on systems that support it. This
  90. allows for considerable speed-up in sparse-file detection.
  91. New option --hole-detection is provided, that allows the user to
  92. select the algorithm used for hole detection. Available arguments
  93. are:
  94. --hole-detection=seek
  95. Use lseek(2) SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE "whence" parameters.
  96. --hole-detection=raw
  97. Scan entire file before storing it to determine where holes
  98. are located.
  99. The default is to use "seek" whenever possible, and fall back to
  100. "raw" otherwise.
  101. version 1.28, 2014-07-28
  102. * New checkpoint action: totals
  103. The --checkpoint-action=totals option instructs tar to output the
  104. total number of bytes transferred at each checkpoint.
  105. * Extended checkpoint format specification.
  106. New conversion specifiers are implemented. Some of them take
  107. optional arguments, supplied in curly braces between the percent
  108. sign and the specifier letter.
  109. %d - Number of seconds since tar started.
  110. %{r,w,d}T - I/O totals; optional arguments supply prefixes
  111. to be used before number of bytes read, written and
  112. deleted, correspondingly.
  113. %{FMT}t - Current local time using FMT as strftime(3) format.
  114. If {FMT} is omitted, use %c.
  115. %{N}* - Pad output with spaces to the Nth column, or to the
  116. current screen width, if {N} is not given.
  117. %c - A shortcut for "%{%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S}t: %ds, %{read,wrote}T%*\r"
  118. * New option --one-top-level
  119. The option --one-top-level tells tar to extract all files into a
  120. subdirectory named by the base name of the archive (minus standard
  121. compression suffixes recognizable by --auto-compress). When used with
  122. an argument, as in --one-top-level=DIR, the files are extracted into the
  123. supplied DIRectory. This ensures that no archive members are
  124. extracted outside of the specified directory, even if the archive is
  125. crafted so as to put them elsewhere.
  126. * New option --sort
  127. The --sort=ORDER option instructs tar to sort directory entries
  128. according to ORDER. It takes effect when creating archives.
  129. Available ORDERs are: none (the default), name and inode. The
  130. latter may be absent, if the underlying system does not provide
  131. the necessary information.
  132. Using --sort=name ensures the member ordering in the created archive
  133. is uniform and reproducible. Using --sort=inode reduces the number
  134. of disk seeks made when creating the archive and thus can considerably
  135. speed up archivation.
  136. * New exclusion options
  137. --exclude-ignore=FILE Before dumping a directory check if it
  138. contains FILE, and if so read exclude
  139. patterns for this directory from FILE.
  140. --exclude-ignore-recursive=FILE
  141. Same as above, but the exclusion patterns
  142. read from FILE remain in effect for any
  143. subdirectory, recursively.
  144. --exclude-vcs-ignores Read exclude tags from VCS ignore files,
  145. where such files exist. Supported VCS's
  146. are: CVS, Git, Bazaar, Mercurial.
  147. * Tar refuses to read input from and write output to a tty device.
  148. * Manpages
  149. This release includes official tar(1) and rmt(8) manpages.
  150. Distribution maintainers are kindly asked to use these instead of the
  151. home-made pages they have been providing so far.
  152. version 1.27.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2013-11-17
  153. * Bug fixes
  154. * Fix unquoting of file names obtained via the -T option.
  155. * Fix GNU long link header timestamp (backward compatibility).
  156. * Fix extracting sparse members from star archives.
  157. version 1.27 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2013-10-05
  158. * Bug fixes
  159. ** Sparse files with large data
  160. When creating a PAX-format archive, tar no longer arbitrarily restricts
  161. the size of the representation of a sparse file to be less than 8 GiB.
  162. * Quoting
  163. In the default C locale, diagnostics and output of 'tar' have been
  164. adjusted to quote 'like this' (with apostrophes) instead of `like this'
  165. (with an accent grave character and an apostrophe). This tracks
  166. recent changes to the GNU coding standards.
  167. * --owner and --group names and numbers
  168. The --owner and --group options now accept operands of the form
  169. NAME:NUM, so that you can specify both symbolic name and numeric ID
  170. for owner and group. In these options, NAME no longer needs to be
  171. present in the current host's user and group databases.
  172. * The --keep-old-files and --skip-old-files options.
  173. This release restores the traditional functionality of the
  174. --keep-old-files. This option causes tar to avoid replacing
  175. existing files while extracting and to treat such files as errors.
  176. Tar will emit a prominent error message upon encountering such files
  177. and will exit with code 2 when finished extracting the archive.
  178. A new option --skip-old-files is introduced, which acts exactly as
  179. --keep-old-files, except that it does not treat existing files as
  180. errors. Instead it just silently skips them. An additional level of
  181. verbosity can be obtained by using the option --warning=existing-file
  182. together with this option.
  183. * Support for POSIX ACLs, extended attributes and SELinux context.
  184. Starting with this version tar is able to store, extract and list
  185. extended file attributes, POSIX.1e ACLs and SELinux context. This is
  186. controlled by the command line options --xattrs, --acls and --selinux,
  187. correspondingly. Each of these options has a `--no-' counterpart
  188. (e.g. --no-xattrs), which disables the corresponding feature.
  189. Additionally, the options --xattrs-include and --xattrs-exclude allow
  190. you to selectively control for which files to store (or extract) the
  191. extended attributes.
  192. * Passing command line arguments to external commands.
  193. Any option taking a command name as its argument now accepts a full
  194. command line as well. Thus, it is now possible to pass additional
  195. arguments to invoked programs. The affected options are:
  196. --checkpoint-action=exec
  197. -I, --use-compress-program
  198. -F, --info-script
  199. --to-command
  200. Furthermore, if any additional information is supplied to such a
  201. command via environment variables, these variables can now be used in
  202. the command line itself. Care should be taken to escape them, to
  203. prevent from being expanded too early, for example:
  204. tar -x -f a.tar --info-script='changevol $TAR_ARCHIVE $TAR_VOLUME'
  205. * New configure option --enable-gcc-warnings, intended for debugging.
  206. * New warning control option --warning=[no-]record-size
  207. On extraction, this option controls whether to display actual record
  208. size, if it differs from the default.
  209. * New command line option --keep-directory-symlink
  210. By default, if trying to extract a directory from the archive,
  211. tar discovers that the corresponding file name already exists and is a
  212. symbolic link, it first unlinks the entry, and then extracts the directory.
  213. This option disables this behavior and instructs tar to follow
  214. symlinks to directories when extracting from the archive.
  215. It is mainly intended to provide compatibility with the Slackware
  216. installation scripts.
  217. version 1.26 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2011-03-12
  218. * Bugfixes
  219. ** Fix the --verify option, which broke in version 1.24.
  220. ** Fix storing long sparse file names in PAX archives.
  221. ** Fix correctness of --atime-preserve=replace
  222. tar --atime-preserve=replace no longer tries to restore atime of
  223. zero-sized files.
  224. ** Work around POSIX incompatibilities on FreeBSD, NetBSD and Tru64
  225. ** Fix bug with --one-file-system --listed-incremental
  226. When invoked with these two options, tar 1.25 would add only the
  227. top-level directory to the archive, but not its contents.
  228. version 1.25 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-11-07
  229. * Fix extraction of empty directories with the -C option in effect.
  230. * Fix extraction of device nodes.
  231. * Make sure name matching occurs before eventual name transformation.
  232. Tar 1.24 changed the ordering of name matching and name transformation
  233. so that the former saw already transformed file names. This made it
  234. impossible to match file names in certain cases. It is fixed now.
  235. * Fix the behavior of tar -x --overwrite on hosts lacking O_NOFOLLOW.
  236. * Improve the testsuite.
  237. * Alternative decompression programs.
  238. If extraction from a compressed archive fails because the corresponding
  239. compression program is not installed and the following two conditions
  240. are met, tar retries extraction using an alternative decompressor:
  241. 1. Another compression program supported by tar is able to handle this
  242. compression format.
  243. 2. The compression program was not explicitly requested in the command
  244. line by the use of such options as -z, -j, etc.
  245. For example, if 'compress' is not available, tar will try 'gzip'.
  246. version 1.24 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-10-24
  247. * The --full-time option.
  248. New command line option '--full-time' instructs tar to output file
  249. time stamps to the full resolution.
  250. * Bugfixes.
  251. ** More reliable directory traversal when creating archives
  252. Tar now checks for inconsistencies caused when a file system is
  253. modified while tar is creating an archive. In the new approach, tar
  254. maintains a cache of file descriptors to directories, so it uses more
  255. file descriptors than before, but it adjusts to system limits on
  256. the number of file descriptors. Tar also takes more care when
  257. a file system is modified while tar is extracting from an archive.
  258. The new checks are implemented via the openat and related calls
  259. standardized by POSIX.1-2008. On an older system where these calls do
  260. not exist or do not return useful results, tar emulates the calls at
  261. some cost in efficiency and reliability.
  262. ** Symbolic link attributes
  263. When extracting symbolic links, tar now restores attributes such as
  264. last-modified time and link permissions, if the operating system
  265. supports this. For example, recent versions of the Linux kernel
  266. support setting times on symlinks, and some BSD kernels also support
  267. symlink permissions.
  268. ** --dereference consistency
  269. The --dereference (-h) option now applies to files that are copied
  270. into or out of archives, independently of other options. For example,
  271. if F is a symbolic link and archive.tar contains a regular-file member
  272. also named F, "tar --overwrite -x -f archive.tar F" now overwrites F
  273. itself, rather than the file that F points to. (To overwrite the file
  274. that F points to, add the --dereference (-h) option.) Formerly,
  275. --dereference was intended to apply only when using the -c option, but
  276. the implementation was not consistent.
  277. Also, the --dereference option no longer affects accesses to other
  278. files, such as archives and time stamp files. Symbolic links to these
  279. files are always followed. Previously, the links were usually but not
  280. always followed.
  281. ** Spurious error diagnostics on broken pipe.
  282. When receiving SIGPIPE, tar would exit with error status and
  283. "write error" diagnostics. In particular, this occurred if
  284. invoked as in the example below:
  285. tar tf archive.tar | head -n 1
  286. ** --remove-files
  287. 'tar --remove-files' failed to remove a directory which contained
  288. symlinks to another files within that directory.
  289. ** --test-label behavior
  290. In case of a mismatch, 'tar --test-label LABEL' exits with code 1,
  291. not 2 as it did in previous versions.
  292. The '--verbose' option used with '--test-label' provides additional
  293. diagnostics.
  294. Several volume labels may be specified in a command line, e.g.:
  295. tar --test-label -f archive 'My volume' 'New volume' 'Test volume'
  296. In this case, tar exits with code 0 if any one of the arguments
  297. matches the actual volume label.
  298. ** --label used with --update
  299. The '--label' option can be used with '--update' to prevent accidental
  300. update of an archive:
  301. tar -rf archive --label 'My volume' .
  302. This did not work in previous versions, in spite of what the docs said.
  303. ** --record-size and --tape-length (-L) options
  304. Usual size suffixes are allowed for these options. For example,
  305. -L10k stands for a 10 kilobyte tape length.
  306. ** Fix dead loop on extracting existing symlinks with the -k option.
  307. version 1.23 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-03-10
  308. * Record size autodetection
  309. When listing or extracting archives, the actual record size is
  310. reported only if the archive is read from a device (as opposed
  311. to regular files and pipes).
  312. * Seekable archives
  313. When a read-only operation (e.g. --list or --extract) is requested
  314. on a regular file, tar attemtps to speed up accesses by using lseek.
  315. * New command line option '--warning'
  316. The '--warning' command line option allows to suppress or enable
  317. particular warning messages during 'tar' run. It takes a single
  318. argument (a 'keyword'), identifying the class of warning messages
  319. to affect. If the argument is prefixed with 'no-', such warning
  320. messages are suppressed. For example,
  321. tar --warning=no-alone-zero-block -x -f archive
  322. suppresses the output of "A lone zero block" diagnostics, which is
  323. normally issued if 'archive' ends with a single block of zeros.
  324. See Tar Manual, section 3.9 "Controlling Warning Messages", for a
  325. detailed discussion.
  326. * New command line option '--level'
  327. The '--level=N' option sets the incremental dump level N. It
  328. is valid when used in conjunction with the -c and --listed-incremental
  329. options. So far the only meaningful value for N is 0. The
  330. '--level=0' option forces creating the level 0 dump, by truncating
  331. the snapshot file if it exists.
  332. * Files removed during incremental dumps
  333. If a file or directory is removed while incremental dump is
  334. in progress, tar exact actions depend on whether this file
  335. was explicitly listed in the command line, or was found
  336. during file system scan.
  337. If the file was explicitly listed in the command line, tar
  338. issues error message and exits with the code 2, meaning
  339. fatal error.
  340. Otherwise, if the file was found during the file system scan,
  341. tar issues a warning, saying "File removed before we read it",
  342. and sets exit code to 1, which means "some files differ".
  343. If the --warning=no-file-removed option is given, no warning
  344. is issued and exit code remains 0.
  345. * Modification times of PAX extended headers.
  346. Modification times in ustar header blocks of extended headers
  347. are set to mtimes of the corresponding archive members. This
  348. can be overridden by the
  349. --pax-option='exthdr.mtime=STRING'
  350. command line option. The STRING is either number of seconds since
  351. the Epoch or a "Time reference" (see below).
  352. Modification times in ustar header blocks of global extended
  353. headers are set to the time when tar was invoked.
  354. This can be overridden by the
  355. --pax-option='globexthdr.mtime=STRING'
  356. command line option. The STRING is either number of seconds since
  357. the Epoch or a "Time reference" (see below).
  358. * Time references in --pax-option argument.
  359. Any value from the --pax-option argument that is enclosed in a pair
  360. of curly braces represents a time reference. The string between the
  361. braces is understood either as a textual time representation, as described in
  362. chapter 7, "Date input formats", of the Tar manual, or as a name of
  363. an existing file, starting with '/' or '.'. In the latter
  364. case, it is replaced with the modification time of that file.
  365. * Environment of --to-command script.
  366. The environment passed to the --to-command script is extended with
  367. the following variables:
  368. TAR_VERSION GNU tar version number
  369. TAR_ARCHIVE The name of the archive
  370. TAR_VOLUME Ordinal number of the volume
  371. TAR_FORMAT Format of the archive
  372. TAR_BLOCKING_FACTOR Current blocking factor
  373. * Bugfixes
  374. ** Fix handling of hard link targets by -c --transform.
  375. ** Fix hard links recognition with -c --remove-files.
  376. ** Fix restoring files from backup (debian bug #508199).
  377. ** Correctly restore modes and permissions on existing directories.
  378. ** The --remove-files option removes files only if they were
  379. succesfully stored in the archive.
  380. ** Fix storing and listing of the volume labels in POSIX format.
  381. ** Improve algorithm for splitting long file names (ustar
  382. format).
  383. ** Fix possible memory overflow in the rmt client code (CVE-2010-0624).
  384. version 1.22 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2009-03-05
  385. * Support for xz compression
  386. Tar uses xz for compression if one of the following conditions is met:
  387. 1. The option --xz or -J (see below) is used.
  388. 2. The xz binary is set as compressor using --use-compress-program option.
  389. 3. The file name of the archive being created ends in '.xz' and
  390. auto-compress option (-a) is used.
  391. Xz is used for decompression if one of the following conditions is met:
  392. 1. The option --xz or -J is used.
  393. 2. The xz binary is set as compressor using --use-compress-program option.
  394. 3. The file is recognized as xz compressed stream data.
  395. * Short option -J reassigned as a short equivalent of --xz
  396. * New option -I
  397. The -I option is assigned as a short equivalent for
  398. --use-compress-program.
  399. * The --no-recursive option works in incremental mode.
  400. version 1.21 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2008-12-27
  401. * New short option -J
  402. A shortcut for --lzma.
  403. * New option --lzop
  404. * New option --no-auto-compress
  405. Cancels the effect of previous --auto-compress (-a) option.
  406. * New option --no-null
  407. Cancels the effect of previous --null option.
  408. * Compressed format recognition
  409. If tar is unable to determine archive compression format, it falls
  410. back to using archive suffix to determine it.
  411. * VCS support.
  412. Using --exclude-vcs handles also files used internally by Bazaar,
  413. Mercurial and Darcs.
  414. * Transformation scope flags
  415. Name transformation expressions understand additional flags that
  416. control type of archive members affected by them. The flags are:
  417. - r
  418. Apply transformation to regular archive members.
  419. - s
  420. Apply transformation to symbolic link targets.
  421. - h
  422. Apply transformation to hard link targets.
  423. Corresponding upper-case letters negate the meaning, so that
  424. 'H' means "do not apply transformation to hard link targets".
  425. The scope flags are listed in the third part of an 's' expression,
  426. e.g.:
  427. tar --transform 's|^|/usr/local/|S'
  428. Default is 'rsh', which means that transformations are applied to
  429. both regular archive members and to the targets of symbolic and hard
  430. links. If several transform expressions are used, the default flags
  431. can be changed using 'flags=' statement before the expressions, e.g.:
  432. tar --transform 'flags=S;s|^|/usr/local/|S'
  433. * Bugfixes
  434. ** The --null option disabled handling of tar options in list files. This
  435. is fixed.
  436. ** Fixed record size autodetection. If the detected record size differs from
  437. the expected value (either default one, or the one set from the
  438. command line), tar always prints a warning if verbosity level is set
  439. to 1 or greater, i.e. if either -t or -v option is given.
  440. version 1.20 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2008-04-14
  441. * New option --auto-compress (-a)
  442. With --create, selects compression algorithm basing on the suffix
  443. of the archive file name.
  444. * New option --lzma
  445. Selects LZMA compression algorithm
  446. * New option --hard-dereference
  447. During archive creation, dereferences hard links and stores the files
  448. they refer to, instead of creating usual hard link members (type '1').
  449. * New option --checkpoint-action
  450. This action allows to specify an action to be executed upon hitting a
  451. checkpoint. Recognized actions are: dot, echo (the default),
  452. echo=string, ttyout=string, exec=cmdline, and sleep=value. Any number
  453. of '--checkpoint-action' options can be specified, the actions will be
  454. executed in order of their appearance in the command line. See
  455. chapter 3.8 "Checkpoints" for a complete description.
  456. * New options --no-check-device, --check-device.
  457. The '--no-check-device' option disables comparing device numbers during
  458. preparatory stage of an incremental dump. This allows to avoid
  459. creating full dumps if the device numbers change (e.g. when using an
  460. LVM snapshot).
  461. The '--check-device' option enables comparing device numbers. This is
  462. the default. This option is provided to undo the effect of the previous
  463. '--no-check-device' option, e.g. if it was set in TAR_OPTIONS
  464. environment variable.
  465. * The --transform option.
  466. Any number of '--transform' options can be given in the command line.
  467. The specified transformations will be applied in turn.
  468. The argument to '--transform' option can be a list of replace
  469. expressions, separated by a semicolon (as in 'sed').
  470. Filename transformations are applied to symbolic link targets
  471. during both creation and extraction. Tar 1.19 used them only
  472. during extraction.
  473. For a detailed description, see chapter 6.7 "Modifying File and Member
  474. Names".
  475. * Info (end-of-volume) scripts
  476. The value of the blocking factor is made available to info and
  477. checkpoint scripts via environment variable TAR_BLOCKING_FACTOR.
  478. * Incremental archives
  479. Improved (sped up) extracting from incremental archives.
  480. * Bugfixes.
  481. ** Fix bug introduced in version 1.19: tar refused to update non-existing
  482. archives.
  483. version 1.19 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2007-10-10
  484. * New option --exclude-vcs
  485. Excludes directories and files, created by several widely used version
  486. control systems, e.g. "CVS/", ".svn/", etc.
  487. * --exclude-tag and --exclude-cache options
  488. The following options now work with incremental archives as well:
  489. --exclude-caches
  490. --exclude-caches-all
  491. --exclude-tag
  492. --exclude-tag-all
  493. --exclude-tag-under
  494. * Fix handling of renamed files in listed incremental archives.
  495. Previous versions always stored absolute file names in rename
  496. records, even if -P was not used. This is fixed: rename records
  497. contain file names processed in accordance with the command line
  498. settings.
  499. * Fix --version output.
  500. * Recognition of broken archives.
  501. When supplied an archive smaller than 512 bytes in reading mode (-x,
  502. -t), the previous version of tar silently ignored it, exiting with
  503. code 0. It is fixed. Tar now issues the following diagnostic message:
  504. 'This does not look like a tar archive', and exits with code 2.
  505. * Fix double-dot recognition in archive member names in case of duplicate '/.'.
  506. * Fix file padding in case of truncation of the input file to zero size.
  507. version 1.18 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2007-06-29
  508. * Licensed under the GPLv3
  509. * Fixed several bugs in the testsuite
  510. version 1.17 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2007-06-08
  511. * Fix archivation of sparse files in posix mode. Previous versions padded
  512. sparse members with spurious zero blocks.
  513. * Fix operation of --verify --listed-incremental. Version 1.16.1 produced
  514. a full dump when both options were given.
  515. * Fix --occurrence. In previous versions it continued scanning the archive
  516. even though all requested members has already been extracted.
  517. * Scope of --transform and --strip-components options.
  518. In addition to affecting regular archive members, the --transform
  519. option affects hard and soft link targets and the --strip-components
  520. option affects hard link targets as well.
  521. * End-of-volume script can send the new volume name to tar by writing
  522. it to the file descriptor stored in the environment variable TAR_FD.
  523. version 1.16.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-12-09
  524. * New option --exclude-tag allows to specify "exclusion tag files", i.e.
  525. files whose presence in a directory means that the directory should not
  526. be archived.
  527. * The --exclude-cache option excludes directories that contain the
  528. CACHEDIR.TAG file from being archived. Previous versions excluded
  529. directory contents only, while the directories themselves were
  530. still added to the archive.
  531. * Support for reading ustar type 'N' header logical records has been removed.
  532. This GNU extension was generated only by very old versions of GNU 'tar'.
  533. Unfortunately its implementation had security holes; see
  534. <http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2006-11/0344.html>.
  535. We don't expect that any tar archives in practical use have type 'N'
  536. records, but if you have one and you trust its contents, you can
  537. decode it with GNU tar 1.16 or earlier.
  538. * Race conditions have been fixed that in some cases briefly allowed
  539. files extracted by 'tar -x --same-owner' (or plain 'tar -x', when
  540. running as root) to be accessed by users that they shouldn't have been.
  541. version 1.16 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-10-21
  542. * After creating an archive, tar exits with code 1 if some files were
  543. changed while being read. Previous versions exited with code 2 (fatal
  544. error), and only if some files were truncated while being archived.
  545. * New option --mtime allows to set modification times for all archive
  546. members during creation.
  547. * Bug fixes
  548. ** Avoid running off file descriptors when using multiple -C options.
  549. ** tar --index-file=FILE --file=- sent the archive to FILE, and
  550. the listing to stderr.
  551. version 1.15.91 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-06-16
  552. * Incompatible changes
  553. ** Globbing
  554. Previous versions of GNU tar assumed shell-style globbing when
  555. extracting from or listing an archive. For example:
  556. tar xf foo.tar '*.c'
  557. would extract all files whose names end in '.c'. This behavior
  558. was not documented and was incompatible with traditional tar
  559. implementations. Therefore, starting from this version, GNU tar
  560. no longer uses globbing by default. For example, the above invocation
  561. is now interpreted as a request to extract from the archive the file
  562. named '*.c'.
  563. To treat member names as globbing patterns, use --wildcards option.
  564. If you wish tar to mimic the behavior of versions up to 1.15.90,
  565. add --wildcards to the value of the environment variable TAR_OPTIONS.
  566. The exact way in which tar interprets member names is controlled by the
  567. following command line options:
  568. --wildcards use wildcards
  569. --anchored patterns match file name start
  570. --ignore-case ignore case
  571. --wildcards-match-slash wildcards match '/'
  572. Each of these options has a '--no-' counterpart that disables its
  573. effect (e.g. --no-wildcards).
  574. These options affect both the interpretation of member names from
  575. command line and that of the exclusion patterns (given with --exclude
  576. and --exclude-from options). The defaults are:
  577. 1. For member names: --no-wildcards --anchored
  578. 2. For exclusion patterns: --wildcards --no-anchored --wildcards-match-slash
  579. The options can appear multiple times in the command line, thereby
  580. changing the way command line arguments are interpreted. For example,
  581. to use case-insensitive matching in exclude patterns and to revert to
  582. case-sensitive matching for the rest of command line, one could write:
  583. tar xf foo.tar --ignore-case --exclude-from=FILE --no-ignore-case file.name
  584. ** Short option -l is now an alias of --check-links option, which complies
  585. with UNIX98. This ends the transition period started with version 1.14.
  586. * New features
  587. ** New option --transform allows to transform file names before storing them
  588. in the archive or member names before extracting. The option takes a
  589. sed replace expression as its argument. For example,
  590. tar cf foo.tar --transform 's,^,prefix/,'
  591. will add 'prefix/' to all file names stored in foo.tar.
  592. ** --strip-components option works when deleting and comparing. In previous
  593. versions it worked only with --extract.
  594. ** New option --show-transformed-names enables display of transformed file
  595. or archive. It generalizes --show-stored-names option, introduced in
  596. 1.15.90. In particular, when creating an archive in verbose mode, it lists
  597. member names as stored in the archive, i.e., with any eventual prefixes
  598. removed and file name transformations applied. The option is useful,
  599. for example, while comparing 'tar cv' and 'tar tv' outputs.
  600. ** New incremental snapshot file format keeps information about file names
  601. as well as that about directories.
  602. ** The --checkpoint option takes an optional argument specifying the number
  603. of records between the two successive checkpoints. Optional dot
  604. starting the argument intructs tar to print dots instead of textual
  605. checkpoints.
  606. ** The --totals option can be used with any tar operation (previous versions
  607. understood it only with --create). If an argument to this option is
  608. given, it specifies the signal upon delivery of which the statistics
  609. is to be printed. Both forms of this option (with and without
  610. argument) can be given to in a single invocation of tar.
  611. * Bug fixes
  612. ** Detect attempts to update compressed archives.
  613. version 1.15.90 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-02-19
  614. * New features
  615. ** Any number of -T (--files-from) options may be used in the command line.
  616. The file specified with -T may include any valid 'tar' options,
  617. including another -T option.
  618. Compatibility note: older versions of tar would only recognize -C
  619. as an option name within the file list file. Now any file whose name
  620. starts with - is handled as an option. To insert file names starting with
  621. dash, use the --add-file option.
  622. ** List files containing null-separated file names are detected and processed
  623. automatically. It is no longer necessary to give the --null option.
  624. ** New option --no-unquote disables the unquoting of input file names.
  625. This is useful for processing output from 'find dir -print0'.
  626. An orthogonal option --unquote is provided as well.
  627. ** New option --test-label tests the archive volume label.
  628. If an argument is specified, the label is compared against its value.
  629. Tar exits with code 0 if the two strings match, and with code 2 if
  630. they do not.
  631. If no argument is given, the --verbose option is implied. In this case,
  632. tar prints the label name if present and exits with code 0.
  633. ** New option --show-stored-names. When creating an archive in verbose mode,
  634. it lists member names as stored in the archive, i.e., with any eventual
  635. prefixes removed. The option is useful, for example, while comparing
  636. 'tar cv' and 'tar tv' outputs.
  637. ** New option --to-command pipes the contents of archive members to the
  638. specified command.
  639. ** New option --atime-preserve=system, which uses the O_NOATIME feature
  640. of recent Linux kernels to avoid some problems when preserving file
  641. access times.
  642. ** New option --delay-directory-restore delays restoring modification times
  643. and permissions of extracted directories until the end of extraction.
  644. This is necessary for restoring from archives with unusual member
  645. ordering (in particular, those created with --no-recursion option).
  646. This option is implied when restoring from incremental archives.
  647. ** New option --restrict prohibits use of some potentially harmful tar
  648. options. Currently it disables '!' escape in multi-volume name menu.
  649. ** New options --quoting-style and --quote-chars control the way tar
  650. quotes member names on output. The --quoting-style takes an argument
  651. specifying the quoting style to use (literal, shell, shell-always,
  652. c, escape, locale, clocale). The argument to --quote-chars is a string
  653. specifying characters to quote, even if the selected quoting style
  654. would not quote them otherwise. The option --no-quote-chars is
  655. provided to disable quoting certain characters.
  656. ** The end-of-volume script (introduced with --info-script option) can
  657. get current archive name from the environment variable TAR_ARCHIVE and
  658. the volume number from the variable TAR_VOLUME. It can alter the
  659. archive name by writing new name to the file descriptor 3.
  660. ** Better support for full-resolution time stamps. Tar cannot restore
  661. time stamps to full nanosecond resolution, though, until the kernel
  662. guys get their act together and give us a system call to set file time
  663. stamps to nanosecond resolution.
  664. ** The -v option now prints time stamps only to 1-minute resolution,
  665. not full resolution, to avoid using up too many output columns.
  666. Nanosecond resolution is now supported, but that would be too much.
  667. * Bug fixes
  668. ** Allow non-option arguments to be interspersed with options.
  669. ** When extracting or listing archives in old GNU format, tar
  670. used to read an extra block of data after a long name header
  671. if length of the member name was divisible by block size (512).
  672. Consequently, the file pointer was set off and the next member
  673. was not processed correctly.
  674. ** Previous version created invalid archives when files shrink
  675. during reading.
  676. ** Compare mode (tar d) hung when trying to compare file contents.
  677. ** Previous versions in certain cases failed to restore directory
  678. modification times.
  679. ** When creating an archive, do not attempt to store files whose
  680. meta-data cannot be stored in the header due to format limitations
  681. (for ustar and v7 formats).
  682. ** The --version option now also outputs information about copyright,
  683. license, and credits. This reverts to the behavior of tar 1.14 and
  684. earlier, and conforms to the GNU coding standards. The --license (-L)
  685. option introduced in tar 1.15 has been removed, since it's no longer
  686. needed.
  687. version 1.15.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-12-21
  688. This version fixes a bug introduced in 1.15 which caused
  689. tar to refuse to extract files from standard input.
  690. version 1.15 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-12-20
  691. * Compressed archives are recognised automatically, it is no longer
  692. necessary to specify -Z, -z, or -j options to read them. Thus, you can
  693. now run 'tar tf archive.tar.gz'.
  694. * When restoring incremental dumps, --one-file-system option
  695. prevents directory hierarchies residing on different devices
  696. from being purged.
  697. With the previous versions of tar it was dangerous to create
  698. incremental dumps with --one-file-system option, since they
  699. would recursively remove mount points when restoring from the
  700. back up. This change fixes the bug.
  701. * Renamed --strip-path to --strip-components for consistency with
  702. the GNU convention.
  703. * Skipping archive members is sped up if the archive media supports
  704. seeks.
  705. * Restore script starts restoring only if it is given --all (-a) option,
  706. or some patterns. This is to prevent accidental restores.
  707. * 'tar --verify' prints a warning if during archive creation some of
  708. the file names had their prefixes stripped off.
  709. * New option --exclude-caches instructs tar to exclude cache directories
  710. automatically on archive creation. Cache directories are those
  711. containing a standardized tag file, as specified at:
  712. http://www.brynosaurus.com/cachedir/spec.html
  713. * New configure option --with-rmt allows to specify full path name to
  714. the 'rmt' utility. This supersedes DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND variable
  715. introduced in version 1.14
  716. * New configure variable DEFAULT_RMT_DIR allows to specify the directory
  717. where to install 'rmt' utility. This is necessary since modifying
  718. --libexecdir as was suggested for version 1.14 produced a side effect: it
  719. also modified installation prefix for backup scripts (if
  720. --enable-backup-scripts was given).
  721. * Bug fixes:
  722. ** Fixed flow in recognizing files to be included in incremental dumps.
  723. ** Correctly recognize sparse archive members when used with -T option.
  724. ** GNU multivolume headers cannot store filenames longer than 100 characters.
  725. Do not allow multivolume archives to begin with such filenames.
  726. ** If a member with link count > 2 was stored in the archive twice,
  727. previous versions of tar were not able to extract it, since they
  728. were trying to link the file to itself, which always failed and
  729. lead to removing the already extracted copy. Preserve the first
  730. extracted copy in such cases.
  731. ** Restore script was passing improper argument to tar --listed option (which
  732. didn't affect the functionality, but was logically incorrect).
  733. ** Fixed verification of created archives.
  734. ** Fixed unquoting of file names containing backslash escapes (previous
  735. versions failed to recognize \a and \v).
  736. ** When attempting to delete a non-existing member from the archive, previous
  737. versions of tar used to overwrite last archive block with zeroes.
  738. version 1.14 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-05-11
  739. * Added support for POSIX.1-2001 and ustar archive formats.
  740. * New option --format allows to select the output archive format
  741. * The default output format can be selected at configuration time
  742. by presetting the environment variable DEFAULT_ARCHIVE_FORMAT.
  743. Allowed values are GNU, V7, OLDGNU and POSIX.
  744. * New option --strip-path allows to cut off a given number of
  745. path elements from the name of the file being extracted.
  746. * New options --index-file, --no-overwrite-dir. The --overwrite-dir
  747. option is now the default; use --no-overwrite-dir if you prefer
  748. the previous default behavior.
  749. * The semantics of -o option is changed. When extracting, it
  750. does the same as --no-same-owner GNU tar option. This is compatible
  751. with UNIX98 tar. Otherwise, its effect is the same as that of
  752. --old-archive option. This latter is deprecated and will be removed
  753. in future.
  754. * New option --check-links prints a message if not all links are dumped
  755. for a file being archived. This corresponds to the UNIX98 -l option.
  756. The current semantics of the -l option is retained for compatibility
  757. with previous releases, however such usage is strongly deprecated as
  758. the option will change to its UNIX98 semantics in the future releases.
  759. * New option --occurrence[=N] can be used in conjunction with one of
  760. the subcommands --delete, --diff, --extract or --list when a list of
  761. files is given either on the command line or via -T option. This
  762. option instructs tar to process only the Nth occurrence of each named
  763. file. N defaults to 1, so 'tar -x -f archive --occurrence filename'
  764. extracts the first occurrence of 'filename' from 'archive'
  765. and terminates without scanning to the end of the archive.
  766. * New option --pax-option allows to control the handling of POSIX
  767. keywords in 'pax' extended headers. It is equivalent to 'pax'
  768. -o option.
  769. * --incremental and --listed-incremental options work correctly on
  770. individual files, as well as on directories.
  771. * New scripts: backup (replaces old level-0 and level-1) and restore.
  772. The scripts are compiled and installed if --enable-backup-scripts
  773. option is given to configure.
  774. * By default tar searches "rmt" utility in "$prefix/libexec/rmt",
  775. which is consistent with the location where the version of "rmt"
  776. included in the package is installed. Previous versions of tar
  777. used "/etc/rmt". To install "rmt" to its traditional location,
  778. run configure with option --libexecdir=/etc. Otherwise, if you
  779. already have rmt installed and wish to use it, instead of the
  780. shipped in version, set the variable DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND to
  781. the full path name of the utility, e.g., ./configure
  782. DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND=/etc/rmt.
  783. Notice also that the full path name of the "rmt" utility to
  784. use can be set at runtime, by giving option --rmt-command to
  785. tar.
  786. * Removed obsolete command line options:
  787. ** --absolute-paths superseded by --absolute-names
  788. ** --block-compress is not needed any longer
  789. ** --block-size superseded by --blocking-factor
  790. ** --modification-time superseded by --touch
  791. ** --read-full-blocks superseded by --read-full-records
  792. ** --record-number superseded by --block-number
  793. ** --version-control superseded by --backup
  794. * New message translations fi (Finnish), gl (Galician), hr (Croatian),
  795. hu (Hungarian), ms (Malaysian), nb (Norwegian), ro (Romanian), sk
  796. (Slovak), zh_CN (Chinese simplified), zh_TW (Chinese traditional).
  797. The code 'no' for Norwegian (Bokmål) has been withdrawn; use 'nb' instead.
  798. * Bug fixes.
  799. version 1.13.25 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-26
  800. * Bug fixes.
  801. version 1.13.24 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-22
  802. * New option --overwrite-dir.
  803. * Fixes for buffer overrun, porting, and copyright notice problems.
  804. * The message translations for Korean are available again.
  805. version 1.13.23 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-13
  806. * Bug, porting, and copyright notice fixes.
  807. version 1.13.22 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-29
  808. * Bug fixes.
  809. version 1.13.21 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-28
  810. * Porting and copyright notice fixes.
  811. version 1.13.20 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-27
  812. * Some bugs were fixed:
  813. - security problems
  814. - hard links to symbolic links
  815. * New option --recursion (the default) that is the inverse of --no-recursion.
  816. * New options --anchored, --ignore-case, --wildcards,
  817. --wildcards-match-slash, and their negations (e.g., --no-anchored).
  818. Along with --recursion and --no-recursion, these options control how
  819. exclude patterns are interpreted.
  820. * The default interpretation of exclude patterns is now --no-anchored
  821. --no-ignore-case --recursion --wildcards --wildcards-match-slash.
  822. This is a quiet change to the semantics of --exclude. The previous
  823. semantics were a failed attempt at backward compatibility but it
  824. became clear that the semantics were puzzling and did not satisfy
  825. everybody. Rather than continue to try to revive that dead horse we
  826. thought it better to substitute cleaner semantics, with options so
  827. that you can change the behavior more to your liking.
  828. * New message translations for Indonesian and Turkish.
  829. The translation for Korean has been withdrawn due to encoding errors.
  830. It will be reissued once those are fixed.
  831. version 1.13.19 - Paul Eggert, 2001-01-13
  832. * The -I option has been withdrawn, as it was buggy and confusing.
  833. Eventually it is planned to be reintroduced, with the same meaning as -T.
  834. * With an option like -N DATE, if DATE starts with "/" or ".", it is taken
  835. to be a file name; the last-modified time of that file is used as the date.
  836. version 1.13.18 - Paul Eggert, 2000-10-29
  837. * Some security problems have been fixed. 'tar -x' now modifies only
  838. files under the working directory, unless you also specify an unsafe
  839. option like --absolute-names or --overwrite.
  840. * The short name of the --bzip option has been changed to -j,
  841. and -I is now an alias for -T, for compatibility with Solaris tar.
  842. * The manual is now distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
  843. * The new environment variable TAR_OPTIONS holds default command-line options.
  844. * The --no-recursion option now affects extraction too.
  845. * The wording in some diagnostics has been changed slightly.
  846. * Snapshot files now record whether each file was accessed via NFS.
  847. The new file format is upward- and downward-compatible with the old.
  848. * New language supported: da.
  849. * Compilation by traditional (K&R) C compilers is no longer supported.
  850. If you still use such a compiler, please use GCC instead.
  851. * This version of tar works best with GNU gzip test version 1.3 or later.
  852. Please see <ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gzip/>.
  853. * 'tar --delete -f -' now works again.
  854. version 1.13.17 - Paul Eggert, 2000-01-07.
  855. * 'tar --delete -f -' is no longer allowed; it was too buggy.
  856. * Diagnostic messages have been made more regular and consistent.
  857. version 1.13.16 - Paul Eggert, 1999-12-13.
  858. * By default, tar now refuses to overwrite an existing file when
  859. extracting files from an archive; instead, it removes the file
  860. before extracting it. If the existing file is a symbolic link, the
  861. link is removed and not the pointed-to file. There is one
  862. exception: existing nonempty directories are not removed, nor are
  863. their ownerships or permissions extracted. This fixes some
  864. longstanding security problems.
  865. The new --overwrite option enables the old default behavior.
  866. For regular files, tar implements this change by using the O_EXCL
  867. option of 'open' to ensure that it creates the file; if this fails, it
  868. removes the file and tries again. This is similar to the behavior of
  869. the --unlink-first option, but it is faster in the common case of
  870. extracting a new directory.
  871. * By default, tar now ignores file names containing a component of '..'
  872. when extracting, and warns about such file names when creating an archive.
  873. To enable the old behavior, use the -P or --absolute-names option.
  874. * Tar now handles file names with multibyte encodings (e.g., UTF-8, Shift-JIS)
  875. correctly. It relies on the mbrtowc function to handle multibyte characters.
  876. * The file generated by -g or --listed-incremental now uses a format
  877. that is independent of locale, so that users need not worry about
  878. locale when restoring a backup. This is needed for proper support
  879. of multibyte characters. Old-format files can still be read, and
  880. older versions of GNU tar can read new-format files, unless member
  881. names have multibyte chars.
  882. * Many diagnostics have been changed slightly, so that file names are
  883. now output unambiguously. File names in diagnostics now are either
  884. `quoted like this' (in the default C locale) or are followed by
  885. colon, newline, or space, depending on context. Unprintable
  886. characters are escaped with a C-like backslash conventions.
  887. Terminating characters (e.g., close-quote, colon, newline)
  888. are also escaped as needed.
  889. * tar now ignores socket files when creating an archive.
  890. Previously tar archived sockets as fifos, which caused problems.
  891. version 1.13.15 - Paul Eggert, 1999-12-03.
  892. * If a file's ctime changes when being archived, report an error.
  893. Previously tar looked at mtime, which missed some errors.
  894. version 1.13.14 - Paul Eggert, 1999-11-07.
  895. * New translations ja, pt_BR.
  896. * New options --help and --version for rmt.
  897. * Ignore Solaris door files when creating an archive.
  898. version 1.13.13 - Paul Eggert, 1999-10-11.
  899. * Invalid headers in tar files now elicit errors, not just warnings.
  900. * 'tar --version' output conforms to the latest GNU coding standards.
  901. * If you specify an invalid date, 'tar' now substitutes (time_t) -1.
  902. * 'configure --with-dmalloc' is no longer available.
  903. version 1.13.12 - Paul Eggert, 1999-09-24.
  904. * 'tar' now supports hard links to symbolic links.
  905. * New options --no-same-owner, --no-same-permissions.
  906. * --total now also outputs a human-readable size, and a throughput value.
  907. * 'tar' now uses two's-complement base-256 when outputting header
  908. values that are out of the range of the standard unsigned base-8
  909. format. This affects archive members with negative or huge time
  910. stamps or uids, and archive members 8 GB or larger. The new tar
  911. archives cannot be read by traditional tar, or by older versions of
  912. GNU tar. Use the --old-archive option to revert to the old
  913. behavior, which uses unportable representations for negative values,
  914. and which rejects large files.
  915. * On 32-bit hosts, 'tar' now assumes that an incoming time stamp T in
  916. the range 2**31 <= T < 2**32 represents the negative time (T -
  917. 2**32). This behavior is nonstandard and is not portable to 64-bit
  918. time_t hosts, so 'tar' issues a warning.
  919. * 'tar' no longer gives up extracting immediately upon discovering
  920. that an archive contains garbage at the end. It attempts to extract
  921. as many files as possible from the good data before the garbage.
  922. * A read error now causes a nonzero exit status, not just a warning.
  923. * Some diagnostics have been reworded for consistency.
  924. version 1.13.11 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-23.
  925. * The short name of the --bzip option has been changed to -I,
  926. for compatibility with paxutils.
  927. * -T /dev/null now matches nothing; previously, it matched anything
  928. if no explicit operands were given.
  929. * The '--' option now works the same as with other GNU utilities;
  930. it causes later operands to be interpreted as file names, not options,
  931. even if they begin with '-'.
  932. * For the --newer and --after-date options, the table of time zone
  933. abbreviations like 'EST' has been updated to match current practice.
  934. Also, local time abbreviations are now recognized, even if they are
  935. not in tar's hardwired table. Remember, though, that you should use
  936. numeric UTC offsets like '-0500' instead of abbreviations like
  937. 'EST', as abbreviations are not standardized and are ambiguous.
  938. version 1.13.10 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-20.
  939. * 'tar' now uses signed base-64 when outputting header values that are
  940. out of the range of the standard unsigned base-8 format. [This
  941. change was superseded in 1.13.12, described above.]
  942. version 1.13.9 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-18.
  943. * 'tar' now writes two zero blocks at end-of-archive instead of just one.
  944. POSIX.1 requires this, and some other 'tar' implementations check for it.
  945. * 'tar' no longer silently accepts a block containing nonzero checksum bytes
  946. as a zero block.
  947. * 'tar' now reads buggy tar files that have a null byte at the start of a
  948. numeric header field.
  949. version 1.13.8 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-16.
  950. * For compatibility with traditional 'tar', intermediate directories
  951. created automatically by root are no longer given the uid and gid of
  952. the original file or directory.
  953. version 1.13.7 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-14.
  954. * --listed-incremental and --newer are now incompatible options.
  955. * When creating an archive, leading './' is no longer stripped,
  956. to match traditional tar's behavior (and simplify the documentation).
  957. * --diff without --absolute-names no longer falls back on absolute names.
  958. version 1.13.6 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-11.
  959. * An --exclude pattern containing / now excludes a file only if it matches an
  960. initial prefix of the file name; a pattern without / continues to
  961. exclude a file if it matches any file name component.
  962. * The protocol for talking to rmt has been extended slightly.
  963. Open flags are now communicated in symbolic format as well as numeric.
  964. The symbolic format (e.g., "O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC") is for portability
  965. when rmt is operating on a different operating system from tar.
  966. The numeric format is retained, and rmt uses it if symbolic format is absent,
  967. for backward compatibility with older versions of tar and rmt.
  968. * When writing GNU tar format headers, tar now uses signed base-64
  969. for values that cannot be represented in unsigned octal.
  970. This supports larger files (2**66 - 1 bytes instead of 2**33 - 1 bytes),
  971. larger uids, negative time stamps, etc.
  972. * When extracting files with unknown ownership, tar now looks up the
  973. uid and gid "nobody" on hosts whose headers do not define UID_NOBODY
  974. and GID_NOBODY, and falls back on uid/gid -2 if there is no "nobody".
  975. * tar -t --numeric-owner now prints numeric uids and gids, not symbolic.
  976. * New option -y or --bzip2 for bzip2 compression, by popular request.
  977. version 1.13.5 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-20.
  978. * Do the delayed updates of file metadata even after a fatal error.
  979. version 1.13.4 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-20.
  980. * Do not chmod unless we are root or the -p option was given;
  981. this matches historical practice.
  982. version 1.13.3 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-16.
  983. * A path name is excluded if any of its file name components matches an
  984. excluded pattern, even if the path name was specified on the command line.
  985. Also see 1.13.6 for later changes in this area.
  986. version 1.13.2 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-14.
  987. * Bug reporting address changed to <[email protected]>.
  988. version 1.13.1 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-12.
  989. * Bug fixes only.
  990. version 1.13 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-08.
  991. * Support for large files, e.g., files larger than 2 GB on many 32-bit hosts.
  992. Also, support for larger uids, device ids, etc.
  993. * Many bug fixes and porting fixes.
  994. * This release is only for fixes. A more ambitious test release,
  995. with new features, is available as part of the paxutils. Please see:
  996. ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/paxutils/
  997. The fixes in this release are intended to be merged with paxutils
  998. at some point, but they haven't been merged yet.
  999. * An interim GNU tar alpha had new --bzip2 and --ending-file options,
  1000. but they have been removed to maintain compatibility with paxutils.
  1001. Please try --use=bzip2 instead of --bzip2.
  1002. Version 1.12 - François Pinard, 1997-04.
  1003. Sensitive matters
  1004. * Use shell globbing patterns for --label, instead of regular expressions.
  1005. * Do not quote anymore internally over the quoting done by the shell.
  1006. Output for humans
  1007. * Offer internationalization capabilities of most recent GNU gettext.
  1008. * Messages available in many more languages, thanks to all translators!
  1009. * Usage of ISO 8601 dates in listings, instead of local American dates.
  1010. * More normalization and cleanup in error messages.
  1011. Creation
  1012. * For helping using tar with find, offer a --no-recursion option.
  1013. * Implement --numeric-owner for ignoring symbolic names at create time.
  1014. * New --owner, --group --mode options, still preliminary.
  1015. * Recognize creating an archive on /dev/null, so Amanda works faster.
  1016. * Object to the creation of an empty archive (like in 'tar cf FILE').
  1017. * Barely start implementing --posix and POSIXLY_CORRECT.
  1018. Extraction
  1019. * Make a better job at restoring file and directory attributes.
  1020. * Automatically attempt deleting existing files when in the way.
  1021. * Option --unlink-first (-U) removes most files prior to extraction.
  1022. * Option --recursive-unlink removes non-empty directories when in the way.
  1023. * Option --numeric-owner ignores owner/group names, it uses UID/GID instead.
  1024. * Use global umask when creating missing intermediate directories.
  1025. * When symlinks are not available, extract symbolic links as hard links.
  1026. * Diagnose extraction of contiguous files as regular files.
  1027. * New --backup, --suffix and --version-control options.
  1028. Various changes
  1029. * Better support of huge archives with --tape-length and --totals.
  1030. * Rename option --read-full-blocks (-B) to --read-full-records (-B).
  1031. * Rename option --block-size (-b) to --blocking-factor (-b).
  1032. * Rename option --record-number (-R) to --block-number (-R).
  1033. * With --block-number (-R), report null blocks and end of file.
  1034. * Implement --record-size for introducing a size in bytes.
  1035. * Delete --block-compress option and rather decide it automatically.
  1036. * Rename option --modification-time to --touch.
  1037. Many bugs are squashed, while others still run free.
  1038. Version 1.11.8 - François Pinard, 1995-06.
  1039. * Messages available in French, German, Portuguese and Swedish.
  1040. * The distribution provides a rudimentary Texinfo manual.
  1041. * The device defaults to stdin/stdout, unless overridden by the installer.
  1042. * Option --sparse (-S) should work on more systems.
  1043. * Option --rsh-command may select an alternative remote shell program.
  1044. Most changes are internal, and should yield better portability.
  1045. Version 1.11.2 - Michael Bushnell, 1993-03.
  1046. * Changes in backup scripts: cleaned up considerably; notices error
  1047. conditions better over rsh; DUMP_REMIND_SCRIPT is now an option in
  1048. backup-specs; new file dump-remind is an example of a
  1049. DUMP_REMIND_SCRIPT.
  1050. * Superfluous "Reading dirname" was a bug; fixed.
  1051. * Incompatibility problems with a bug on Solaris are fixed.
  1052. * New option --gzip (aliases are --ungzip and -z); calls gzip instead
  1053. of compress. Also, --use-compress-program lets you specify any
  1054. compress program. --compress-block is renamed --block-compress and
  1055. now requires one of the three compression options to be specified.
  1056. * Several error messages are cleaned up.
  1057. * Directory owners are now set properly when running as root.
  1058. * Provide DUMP_REMIND_SCRIPT in backup-specs as a possible option
  1059. for --info-script.
  1060. * Behave better with broken rmt servers.
  1061. * Dump scripts no longer use --atime-preserve; this causes a nasty probem.
  1062. * Several Makefile cleanups.
  1063. Version 1.11.1 - Michael Bushnell, 1992-09.
  1064. * Many bug fixes.
  1065. Version 1.11 - Michael Bushnell, 1992-09.
  1066. Version 1.10.16 - 1992-07.
  1067. Version 1.10.15 - 1992-06.
  1068. Version 1.10.14 - 1992-05.
  1069. Version 1.10.13 - 1992-01.
  1070. * Many bug fixes.
  1071. * Now uses GNU standard configure, generated by Autoconf.
  1072. * Long options now use '--'; use of '+' is deprecated and support
  1073. for it will eventually be removed.
  1074. * New option --null causes filenames read by -T to be
  1075. null-terminated, and causes -C to be ignored.
  1076. * New option --remove-files deletes files (but not directories)
  1077. after they are added to the archive.
  1078. * New option --ignore-failed-read prevents read-errors from affecting
  1079. the exit status.
  1080. * New option --checkpoint prints occasional messages as the tape
  1081. is being read or written.
  1082. * New option --show-omitted-dirs prints the names of directories
  1083. omitted from the archive.
  1084. * Some tape drives which use a non-standard method of indicating
  1085. end-of-tape now work correctly with multi-tape archives.
  1086. * --volno-file: Read the volume number used in prompting the user
  1087. (but not in recording volume ID's on the archive) from a file.
  1088. * When using --multi-volume, you can now give multiple -f arguments;
  1089. the various tape drives will get used in sequence and then wrap
  1090. around to the beginning.
  1091. * Remote archive names no longer have to be in /dev: any file with a
  1092. ':' is interpreted as remote. If new option --force-local is given,
  1093. then even archive files with a ':' are considered local.
  1094. * New option --atime-preserve restores (if possible) atimes to
  1095. their original values after dumping the file.
  1096. * No longer does tar confusingly dump "." when you don't tell it
  1097. what to dump.
  1098. * When extracting directories, tar now correctly restores their
  1099. modification and access times.
  1100. * Longnames support is redone differently--long name info directly
  1101. precedes the long-named file or link in the archive, so you no
  1102. longer have to wait for the extract to hit the end of the tape for
  1103. long names to work.
  1104. Version 1.10 - Michael Bushnell, 1991-07.
  1105. * Filename to -G is optional. -C works right. Names +newer and
  1106. +newer-mtime work right.
  1107. * -g is now +incremental, -G is now +listed-incremental.
  1108. * Sparse files now work correctly.
  1109. * +volume is now called +label.
  1110. * +exclude now takes a filename argument, and +exclude-from does
  1111. what +exclude used to do.
  1112. * Exit status is now correct.
  1113. * +totals keeps track of total I/O and prints it when tar exits.
  1114. * When using +label with +extract, the label is now a regexp.
  1115. * New option +tape-length (-L) does multi-volume handling like BSD
  1116. dump: you tell tar how big the tape is and it will prompt at that
  1117. point instead of waiting for a write error.
  1118. * New backup scripts level-0 and level-1 which might be useful
  1119. to people. They use a file "backup-specs" for information, and
  1120. shouldn't need local modification. These are what we use to do
  1121. all our backups at the FSF.
  1122. Version 1.09 - Jay Fenlason, 1990-10.
  1123. Version 1.08 - Jay Fenlason, 1990-01.
  1124. Versions 1.07 back to 1.00 by Jay Fenlason.
  1125. * See ChangeLog for more details.
  1126. Copyright 1994-2001, 2003-2010, 2013-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
  1127. This file is part of GNU tar.
  1128. GNU tar is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
  1129. it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
  1130. the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
  1131. (at your option) any later version.
  1132. GNU tar is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
  1133. but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
  1134. MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
  1135. GNU General Public License for more details.
  1136. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  1137. along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
  1138. Local variables:
  1139. mode: outline
  1140. paragraph-separate: "[ ]*$"
  1141. eval: (add-hook 'write-file-hooks 'time-stamp)
  1142. time-stamp-start: "changes. "
  1143. time-stamp-format: "%:y-%02m-%02d"
  1144. time-stamp-end: "\n"
  1145. end: