]> git.ipfire.org Git - thirdparty/tar.git/blob - NEWS
--one-top-level: avoid a heap-buffer-overflow
[thirdparty/tar.git] / NEWS
1 GNU tar NEWS - User visible changes. 2018-04-07
2 Please send GNU tar bug reports to <bug-tar@gnu.org>
3
4 \f
5 version 1.30.90 (Git)
6
7 * Fix heap-buffer-overrun with --one-top-level.
8 Bug introduced with the addition of that option in 1.28.
9
10 * Support for zstd compression
11
12 New option '--zstd' instructs tar to use zstd as compression program.
13 When listing, extractng and comparing, zstd compressed archives are
14 recognized automatically.
15 When '-a' option is in effect, zstd compression is selected if the
16 destination archive name ends in '.zst' or '.tzst'.
17
18 \f
19 version 1.30 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2017-12-17
20
21 * Member names containing '..' components are now skipped when extracting.
22
23 This fixes tar's behavior to match its documentation, and is a bit
24 safer when extracting untrusted archives over old files (an unsafe
25 practice that the tar manual has long recommended against).
26
27 * Report erroneous use of position-sensitive options.
28
29 During archive creation or update, tar keeps track of positional
30 options (see the manual, subsection 3.4.4 "Position-Sensitive
31 Options"), and reports those that had no effect. For example, when
32 invoked as
33
34 tar -cf a.tar . --exclude '*.o'
35
36 tar will create the archive, but will exit with status 2, having
37 issued the following error message
38
39 tar: The following options were used after non-optional
40 arguments in archive create or update mode. These options are
41 positional and affect only arguments that follow them. Please,
42 rearrange them properly.
43 tar: --exclude '*.o' has no effect
44 tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
45
46 * --numeric-owner now affects private headers too.
47
48 This helps the output of 'tar' to be more deterministic.
49
50 * Fixed the --delay-directory-restore option
51
52 In some cases tar would restore the directory permissions too early,
53 causing subsequent link extractions in that directory to fail.
54
55 * The --warnings=failed-read option
56
57 This new warning control option suppresses warning messages about
58 unreadable files and directories. It has effect only if used together
59 with the --ignore-failed-read option.
60
61 * The --warnings=none option now suppresses all warnings
62
63 This includes warnings about unreadable files produced when
64 --ignore-failed-read is in effect. To output these, use
65 --warnings=none --warnings=no-failed-read.
66
67 * Fix reporting of hardlink mismatches during compare
68
69 Tar reported incorrect target file name in the 'Not linked to'
70 diagnostic message.
71
72 \f
73 version 1.29 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2016-05-16
74
75 * New options: --verbatim-files-from, --no-verbatim-files-from
76
77 The --verbatim-files-from option instructs tar to treat each line read
78 from a file list as a file name, even if it starts with a dash.
79
80 File lists are supplied with the --files-from (-T) option. By
81 default, each line read from a file list is first stripped off the
82 leading and trailing whitespace and, if the result begins with a dash,
83 it is treated as tar command line option.
84
85 Use the --verbatim-files-from option to disable this special handling.
86 This facilitates the use of tar with file lists created automatically
87 (e.g. by find(1) command).
88
89 This option affects all --files-from options that occur after it in
90 the command line. Its effect is reverted by the
91 --no-verbatim-files-from option.
92
93 * --null option reads file names verbatim
94
95 The --null option implies --verbatim-files-from. I.e. each line
96 read from null-delimited file lists is treated as a file name.
97
98 This restores the documented behavior, which was broken in version
99 1.27.
100
101 * New options: --owner-map=FILE and --group-map=FILE
102
103 These two options provide fine-grained control over what user/group
104 names (or IDs) should be mapped when adding files to archive.
105
106 For both options, FILE is a plain text file with user or group
107 mappings. Empty lines are ignored. Comments are introduced with
108 # sign (unless quoted) and extend to the end of the corresponding
109 line. Each non-empty line defines translation for a single UID (GID).
110 It must consist of two fields, delimited by any amount of whitespace:
111
112 OLDNAME NEWNAME[:NEWID]
113
114 OLDNAME is either a valid user (group) name or a ID prefixed with +. Unless
115 NEWID is supplied, NEWNAME must also be either a valid name or a
116 +ID. Otherwise, both NEWNAME and NEWID need not be listed in the
117 system user database.
118
119 * New option --clamp-mtime
120
121 The new --clamp-mtime option changes the behavior of --mtime to only
122 use the time specified if the file mtime is newer than the given time.
123 The --clamp-mtime option can only be used together with --mtime.
124
125 Typical use case is to make builds reproducible: to loose less
126 information, it's better to keep the original date of an archive,
127 except for files modified during the build process. In that case, using
128 reference (and thus reproducible) timestamps for the latter is good
129 enough.
130
131 See <https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds> for more information.
132
133 * Deprecated --preserve option removed
134
135 * Sparse file detection
136
137 Tar now uses SEEK_DATA/SEEK_HOLE on systems that support it. This
138 allows for considerable speed-up in sparse-file detection.
139
140 New option --hole-detection is provided, that allows the user to
141 select the algorithm used for hole detection. Available arguments
142 are:
143
144 --hole-detection=seek
145 Use lseek(2) SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE "whence" parameters.
146
147 --hole-detection=raw
148 Scan entire file before storing it to determine where holes
149 are located.
150
151 The default is to use "seek" whenever possible, and fall back to
152 "raw" otherwise.
153
154 \f
155 version 1.28, 2014-07-28
156
157 * New checkpoint action: totals
158
159 The --checkpoint-action=totals option instructs tar to output the
160 total number of bytes transferred at each checkpoint.
161
162 * Extended checkpoint format specification.
163
164 New conversion specifiers are implemented. Some of them take
165 optional arguments, supplied in curly braces between the percent
166 sign and the specifier letter.
167
168 %d - Number of seconds since tar started.
169 %{r,w,d}T - I/O totals; optional arguments supply prefixes
170 to be used before number of bytes read, written and
171 deleted, correspondingly.
172 %{FMT}t - Current local time using FMT as strftime(3) format.
173 If {FMT} is omitted, use %c.
174 %{N}* - Pad output with spaces to the Nth column, or to the
175 current screen width, if {N} is not given.
176 %c - A shortcut for "%{%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S}t: %ds, %{read,wrote}T%*\r"
177
178 * New option --one-top-level
179
180 The option --one-top-level tells tar to extract all files into a
181 subdirectory named by the base name of the archive (minus standard
182 compression suffixes recognizable by --auto-compress). When used with
183 an argument, as in --one-top-level=DIR, the files are extracted into the
184 supplied DIRectory. This ensures that no archive members are
185 extracted outside of the specified directory, even if the archive is
186 crafted so as to put them elsewhere.
187
188 * New option --sort
189
190 The --sort=ORDER option instructs tar to sort directory entries
191 according to ORDER. It takes effect when creating archives.
192 Available ORDERs are: none (the default), name and inode. The
193 latter may be absent, if the underlying system does not provide
194 the necessary information.
195
196 Using --sort=name ensures the member ordering in the created archive
197 is uniform and reproducible. Using --sort=inode reduces the number
198 of disk seeks made when creating the archive and thus can considerably
199 speed up archivation.
200
201 * New exclusion options
202
203 --exclude-ignore=FILE Before dumping a directory check if it
204 contains FILE, and if so read exclude
205 patterns for this directory from FILE.
206 --exclude-ignore-recursive=FILE
207 Same as above, but the exclusion patterns
208 read from FILE remain in effect for any
209 subdirectory, recursively.
210 --exclude-vcs-ignores Read exclude tags from VCS ignore files,
211 where such files exist. Supported VCS's
212 are: CVS, Git, Bazaar, Mercurial.
213
214
215 * Tar refuses to read input from and write output to a tty device.
216
217 * Manpages
218
219 This release includes official tar(1) and rmt(8) manpages.
220 Distribution maintainers are kindly asked to use these instead of the
221 home-made pages they have been providing so far.
222
223 \f
224 version 1.27.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2013-11-17
225
226 * Bug fixes
227
228 * Fix unquoting of file names obtained via the -T option.
229
230 * Fix GNU long link header timestamp (backward compatibility).
231
232 * Fix extracting sparse members from star archives.
233
234 \f
235 version 1.27 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2013-10-05
236
237 * Bug fixes
238
239 ** Sparse files with large data
240
241 When creating a PAX-format archive, tar no longer arbitrarily restricts
242 the size of the representation of a sparse file to be less than 8 GiB.
243
244 * Quoting
245
246 In the default C locale, diagnostics and output of 'tar' have been
247 adjusted to quote 'like this' (with apostrophes) instead of `like this'
248 (with an accent grave character and an apostrophe). This tracks
249 recent changes to the GNU coding standards.
250
251 * --owner and --group names and numbers
252
253 The --owner and --group options now accept operands of the form
254 NAME:NUM, so that you can specify both symbolic name and numeric ID
255 for owner and group. In these options, NAME no longer needs to be
256 present in the current host's user and group databases.
257
258 * The --keep-old-files and --skip-old-files options.
259
260 This release restores the traditional functionality of the
261 --keep-old-files. This option causes tar to avoid replacing
262 existing files while extracting and to treat such files as errors.
263 Tar will emit a prominent error message upon encountering such files
264 and will exit with code 2 when finished extracting the archive.
265
266 A new option --skip-old-files is introduced, which acts exactly as
267 --keep-old-files, except that it does not treat existing files as
268 errors. Instead it just silently skips them. An additional level of
269 verbosity can be obtained by using the option --warning=existing-file
270 together with this option.
271
272 * Support for POSIX ACLs, extended attributes and SELinux context.
273
274 Starting with this version tar is able to store, extract and list
275 extended file attributes, POSIX.1e ACLs and SELinux context. This is
276 controlled by the command line options --xattrs, --acls and --selinux,
277 correspondingly. Each of these options has a `--no-' counterpart
278 (e.g. --no-xattrs), which disables the corresponding feature.
279 Additionally, the options --xattrs-include and --xattrs-exclude allow
280 you to selectively control for which files to store (or extract) the
281 extended attributes.
282
283 * Passing command line arguments to external commands.
284
285 Any option taking a command name as its argument now accepts a full
286 command line as well. Thus, it is now possible to pass additional
287 arguments to invoked programs. The affected options are:
288
289 --checkpoint-action=exec
290 -I, --use-compress-program
291 -F, --info-script
292 --to-command
293
294 Furthermore, if any additional information is supplied to such a
295 command via environment variables, these variables can now be used in
296 the command line itself. Care should be taken to escape them, to
297 prevent from being expanded too early, for example:
298
299 tar -x -f a.tar --info-script='changevol $TAR_ARCHIVE $TAR_VOLUME'
300
301 * New configure option --enable-gcc-warnings, intended for debugging.
302
303 * New warning control option --warning=[no-]record-size
304
305 On extraction, this option controls whether to display actual record
306 size, if it differs from the default.
307
308 * New command line option --keep-directory-symlink
309
310 By default, if trying to extract a directory from the archive,
311 tar discovers that the corresponding file name already exists and is a
312 symbolic link, it first unlinks the entry, and then extracts the directory.
313
314 This option disables this behavior and instructs tar to follow
315 symlinks to directories when extracting from the archive.
316
317 It is mainly intended to provide compatibility with the Slackware
318 installation scripts.
319
320 \f
321 version 1.26 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2011-03-12
322
323 * Bugfixes
324
325 ** Fix the --verify option, which broke in version 1.24.
326
327 ** Fix storing long sparse file names in PAX archives.
328
329 ** Fix correctness of --atime-preserve=replace
330
331 tar --atime-preserve=replace no longer tries to restore atime of
332 zero-sized files.
333
334 ** Work around POSIX incompatibilities on FreeBSD, NetBSD and Tru64
335
336 ** Fix bug with --one-file-system --listed-incremental
337
338 When invoked with these two options, tar 1.25 would add only the
339 top-level directory to the archive, but not its contents.
340
341 \f
342 version 1.25 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-11-07
343
344 * Fix extraction of empty directories with the -C option in effect.
345 * Fix extraction of device nodes.
346 * Make sure name matching occurs before eventual name transformation.
347
348 Tar 1.24 changed the ordering of name matching and name transformation
349 so that the former saw already transformed file names. This made it
350 impossible to match file names in certain cases. It is fixed now.
351
352 * Fix the behavior of tar -x --overwrite on hosts lacking O_NOFOLLOW.
353
354 * Improve the testsuite.
355
356 * Alternative decompression programs.
357
358 If extraction from a compressed archive fails because the corresponding
359 compression program is not installed and the following two conditions
360 are met, tar retries extraction using an alternative decompressor:
361
362 1. Another compression program supported by tar is able to handle this
363 compression format.
364 2. The compression program was not explicitly requested in the command
365 line by the use of such options as -z, -j, etc.
366
367 For example, if 'compress' is not available, tar will try 'gzip'.
368
369 \f
370 version 1.24 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-10-24
371
372 * The --full-time option.
373
374 New command line option '--full-time' instructs tar to output file
375 time stamps to the full resolution.
376
377 * Bugfixes.
378
379 ** More reliable directory traversal when creating archives
380
381 Tar now checks for inconsistencies caused when a file system is
382 modified while tar is creating an archive. In the new approach, tar
383 maintains a cache of file descriptors to directories, so it uses more
384 file descriptors than before, but it adjusts to system limits on
385 the number of file descriptors. Tar also takes more care when
386 a file system is modified while tar is extracting from an archive.
387
388 The new checks are implemented via the openat and related calls
389 standardized by POSIX.1-2008. On an older system where these calls do
390 not exist or do not return useful results, tar emulates the calls at
391 some cost in efficiency and reliability.
392
393 ** Symbolic link attributes
394
395 When extracting symbolic links, tar now restores attributes such as
396 last-modified time and link permissions, if the operating system
397 supports this. For example, recent versions of the Linux kernel
398 support setting times on symlinks, and some BSD kernels also support
399 symlink permissions.
400
401 ** --dereference consistency
402
403 The --dereference (-h) option now applies to files that are copied
404 into or out of archives, independently of other options. For example,
405 if F is a symbolic link and archive.tar contains a regular-file member
406 also named F, "tar --overwrite -x -f archive.tar F" now overwrites F
407 itself, rather than the file that F points to. (To overwrite the file
408 that F points to, add the --dereference (-h) option.) Formerly,
409 --dereference was intended to apply only when using the -c option, but
410 the implementation was not consistent.
411
412 Also, the --dereference option no longer affects accesses to other
413 files, such as archives and time stamp files. Symbolic links to these
414 files are always followed. Previously, the links were usually but not
415 always followed.
416
417 ** Spurious error diagnostics on broken pipe.
418
419 When receiving SIGPIPE, tar would exit with error status and
420 "write error" diagnostics. In particular, this occurred if
421 invoked as in the example below:
422
423 tar tf archive.tar | head -n 1
424
425 ** --remove-files
426
427 'tar --remove-files' failed to remove a directory which contained
428 symlinks to another files within that directory.
429
430 ** --test-label behavior
431
432 In case of a mismatch, 'tar --test-label LABEL' exits with code 1,
433 not 2 as it did in previous versions.
434
435 The '--verbose' option used with '--test-label' provides additional
436 diagnostics.
437
438 Several volume labels may be specified in a command line, e.g.:
439
440 tar --test-label -f archive 'My volume' 'New volume' 'Test volume'
441
442 In this case, tar exits with code 0 if any one of the arguments
443 matches the actual volume label.
444
445 ** --label used with --update
446
447 The '--label' option can be used with '--update' to prevent accidental
448 update of an archive:
449
450 tar -rf archive --label 'My volume' .
451
452 This did not work in previous versions, in spite of what the docs said.
453
454 ** --record-size and --tape-length (-L) options
455
456 Usual size suffixes are allowed for these options. For example,
457 -L10k stands for a 10 kilobyte tape length.
458
459 ** Fix dead loop on extracting existing symlinks with the -k option.
460
461 \f
462 version 1.23 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-03-10
463
464 * Record size autodetection
465
466 When listing or extracting archives, the actual record size is
467 reported only if the archive is read from a device (as opposed
468 to regular files and pipes).
469
470 * Seekable archives
471
472 When a read-only operation (e.g. --list or --extract) is requested
473 on a regular file, tar attemtps to speed up accesses by using lseek.
474
475 * New command line option '--warning'
476
477 The '--warning' command line option allows to suppress or enable
478 particular warning messages during 'tar' run. It takes a single
479 argument (a 'keyword'), identifying the class of warning messages
480 to affect. If the argument is prefixed with 'no-', such warning
481 messages are suppressed. For example,
482
483 tar --warning=no-alone-zero-block -x -f archive
484
485 suppresses the output of "A lone zero block" diagnostics, which is
486 normally issued if 'archive' ends with a single block of zeros.
487
488 See Tar Manual, section 3.9 "Controlling Warning Messages", for a
489 detailed discussion.
490
491 * New command line option '--level'
492
493 The '--level=N' option sets the incremental dump level N. It
494 is valid when used in conjunction with the -c and --listed-incremental
495 options. So far the only meaningful value for N is 0. The
496 '--level=0' option forces creating the level 0 dump, by truncating
497 the snapshot file if it exists.
498
499 * Files removed during incremental dumps
500
501 If a file or directory is removed while incremental dump is
502 in progress, tar exact actions depend on whether this file
503 was explicitly listed in the command line, or was found
504 during file system scan.
505
506 If the file was explicitly listed in the command line, tar
507 issues error message and exits with the code 2, meaning
508 fatal error.
509
510 Otherwise, if the file was found during the file system scan,
511 tar issues a warning, saying "File removed before we read it",
512 and sets exit code to 1, which means "some files differ".
513 If the --warning=no-file-removed option is given, no warning
514 is issued and exit code remains 0.
515
516 * Modification times of PAX extended headers.
517
518 Modification times in ustar header blocks of extended headers
519 are set to mtimes of the corresponding archive members. This
520 can be overridden by the
521
522 --pax-option='exthdr.mtime=STRING'
523
524 command line option. The STRING is either number of seconds since
525 the Epoch or a "Time reference" (see below).
526
527 Modification times in ustar header blocks of global extended
528 headers are set to the time when tar was invoked.
529
530 This can be overridden by the
531
532 --pax-option='globexthdr.mtime=STRING'
533
534 command line option. The STRING is either number of seconds since
535 the Epoch or a "Time reference" (see below).
536
537 * Time references in --pax-option argument.
538
539 Any value from the --pax-option argument that is enclosed in a pair
540 of curly braces represents a time reference. The string between the
541 braces is understood either as a textual time representation, as described in
542 chapter 7, "Date input formats", of the Tar manual, or as a name of
543 an existing file, starting with '/' or '.'. In the latter
544 case, it is replaced with the modification time of that file.
545
546 * Environment of --to-command script.
547
548 The environment passed to the --to-command script is extended with
549 the following variables:
550
551 TAR_VERSION GNU tar version number
552 TAR_ARCHIVE The name of the archive
553 TAR_VOLUME Ordinal number of the volume
554 TAR_FORMAT Format of the archive
555 TAR_BLOCKING_FACTOR Current blocking factor
556
557 * Bugfixes
558 ** Fix handling of hard link targets by -c --transform.
559 ** Fix hard links recognition with -c --remove-files.
560 ** Fix restoring files from backup (debian bug #508199).
561 ** Correctly restore modes and permissions on existing directories.
562 ** The --remove-files option removes files only if they were
563 succesfully stored in the archive.
564 ** Fix storing and listing of the volume labels in POSIX format.
565 ** Improve algorithm for splitting long file names (ustar
566 format).
567 ** Fix possible memory overflow in the rmt client code (CVE-2010-0624).
568
569 \f
570 version 1.22 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2009-03-05
571
572 * Support for xz compression
573
574 Tar uses xz for compression if one of the following conditions is met:
575
576 1. The option --xz or -J (see below) is used.
577 2. The xz binary is set as compressor using --use-compress-program option.
578 3. The file name of the archive being created ends in '.xz' and
579 auto-compress option (-a) is used.
580
581 Xz is used for decompression if one of the following conditions is met:
582
583 1. The option --xz or -J is used.
584 2. The xz binary is set as compressor using --use-compress-program option.
585 3. The file is recognized as xz compressed stream data.
586
587 * Short option -J reassigned as a short equivalent of --xz
588
589 * New option -I
590
591 The -I option is assigned as a short equivalent for
592 --use-compress-program.
593
594 * The --no-recursive option works in incremental mode.
595
596 \f
597 version 1.21 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2008-12-27
598
599 * New short option -J
600
601 A shortcut for --lzma.
602
603 * New option --lzop
604
605 * New option --no-auto-compress
606
607 Cancels the effect of previous --auto-compress (-a) option.
608
609 * New option --no-null
610
611 Cancels the effect of previous --null option.
612
613 * Compressed format recognition
614
615 If tar is unable to determine archive compression format, it falls
616 back to using archive suffix to determine it.
617
618 * VCS support.
619
620 Using --exclude-vcs handles also files used internally by Bazaar,
621 Mercurial and Darcs.
622
623 * Transformation scope flags
624
625 Name transformation expressions understand additional flags that
626 control type of archive members affected by them. The flags are:
627
628 - r
629 Apply transformation to regular archive members.
630
631 - s
632 Apply transformation to symbolic link targets.
633
634 - h
635 Apply transformation to hard link targets.
636
637 Corresponding upper-case letters negate the meaning, so that
638 'H' means "do not apply transformation to hard link targets".
639
640 The scope flags are listed in the third part of an 's' expression,
641 e.g.:
642
643 tar --transform 's|^|/usr/local/|S'
644
645 Default is 'rsh', which means that transformations are applied to
646 both regular archive members and to the targets of symbolic and hard
647 links. If several transform expressions are used, the default flags
648 can be changed using 'flags=' statement before the expressions, e.g.:
649
650 tar --transform 'flags=S;s|^|/usr/local/|S'
651
652 * Bugfixes
653
654 ** The --null option disabled handling of tar options in list files. This
655 is fixed.
656 ** Fixed record size autodetection. If the detected record size differs from
657 the expected value (either default one, or the one set from the
658 command line), tar always prints a warning if verbosity level is set
659 to 1 or greater, i.e. if either -t or -v option is given.
660
661 \f
662
663 version 1.20 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2008-04-14
664
665 * New option --auto-compress (-a)
666
667 With --create, selects compression algorithm basing on the suffix
668 of the archive file name.
669
670 * New option --lzma
671
672 Selects LZMA compression algorithm
673
674 * New option --hard-dereference
675
676 During archive creation, dereferences hard links and stores the files
677 they refer to, instead of creating usual hard link members (type '1').
678
679 * New option --checkpoint-action
680
681 This action allows to specify an action to be executed upon hitting a
682 checkpoint. Recognized actions are: dot, echo (the default),
683 echo=string, ttyout=string, exec=cmdline, and sleep=value. Any number
684 of '--checkpoint-action' options can be specified, the actions will be
685 executed in order of their appearance in the command line. See
686 chapter 3.8 "Checkpoints" for a complete description.
687
688 * New options --no-check-device, --check-device.
689
690 The '--no-check-device' option disables comparing device numbers during
691 preparatory stage of an incremental dump. This allows to avoid
692 creating full dumps if the device numbers change (e.g. when using an
693 LVM snapshot).
694
695 The '--check-device' option enables comparing device numbers. This is
696 the default. This option is provided to undo the effect of the previous
697 '--no-check-device' option, e.g. if it was set in TAR_OPTIONS
698 environment variable.
699
700 * The --transform option.
701
702 Any number of '--transform' options can be given in the command line.
703 The specified transformations will be applied in turn.
704
705 The argument to '--transform' option can be a list of replace
706 expressions, separated by a semicolon (as in 'sed').
707
708 Filename transformations are applied to symbolic link targets
709 during both creation and extraction. Tar 1.19 used them only
710 during extraction.
711
712 For a detailed description, see chapter 6.7 "Modifying File and Member
713 Names".
714
715 * Info (end-of-volume) scripts
716
717 The value of the blocking factor is made available to info and
718 checkpoint scripts via environment variable TAR_BLOCKING_FACTOR.
719
720 * Incremental archives
721
722 Improved (sped up) extracting from incremental archives.
723
724 * Bugfixes.
725 ** Fix bug introduced in version 1.19: tar refused to update non-existing
726 archives.
727
728 \f
729 version 1.19 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2007-10-10
730
731 * New option --exclude-vcs
732
733 Excludes directories and files, created by several widely used version
734 control systems, e.g. "CVS/", ".svn/", etc.
735
736 * --exclude-tag and --exclude-cache options
737
738 The following options now work with incremental archives as well:
739
740 --exclude-caches
741 --exclude-caches-all
742 --exclude-tag
743 --exclude-tag-all
744 --exclude-tag-under
745
746 * Fix handling of renamed files in listed incremental archives.
747
748 Previous versions always stored absolute file names in rename
749 records, even if -P was not used. This is fixed: rename records
750 contain file names processed in accordance with the command line
751 settings.
752
753 * Fix --version output.
754
755 * Recognition of broken archives.
756
757 When supplied an archive smaller than 512 bytes in reading mode (-x,
758 -t), the previous version of tar silently ignored it, exiting with
759 code 0. It is fixed. Tar now issues the following diagnostic message:
760 'This does not look like a tar archive', and exits with code 2.
761
762 * Fix double-dot recognition in archive member names in case of duplicate '/.'.
763
764 * Fix file padding in case of truncation of the input file to zero size.
765
766 \f
767 version 1.18 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2007-06-29
768
769 * Licensed under the GPLv3
770
771 * Fixed several bugs in the testsuite
772
773 \f
774 version 1.17 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2007-06-08
775
776 * Fix archivation of sparse files in posix mode. Previous versions padded
777 sparse members with spurious zero blocks.
778
779 * Fix operation of --verify --listed-incremental. Version 1.16.1 produced
780 a full dump when both options were given.
781
782 * Fix --occurrence. In previous versions it continued scanning the archive
783 even though all requested members has already been extracted.
784
785 * Scope of --transform and --strip-components options.
786
787 In addition to affecting regular archive members, the --transform
788 option affects hard and soft link targets and the --strip-components
789 option affects hard link targets as well.
790
791 * End-of-volume script can send the new volume name to tar by writing
792 it to the file descriptor stored in the environment variable TAR_FD.
793
794 \f
795 version 1.16.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-12-09
796
797 * New option --exclude-tag allows to specify "exclusion tag files", i.e.
798 files whose presence in a directory means that the directory should not
799 be archived.
800
801 * The --exclude-cache option excludes directories that contain the
802 CACHEDIR.TAG file from being archived. Previous versions excluded
803 directory contents only, while the directories themselves were
804 still added to the archive.
805
806 * Support for reading ustar type 'N' header logical records has been removed.
807 This GNU extension was generated only by very old versions of GNU 'tar'.
808 Unfortunately its implementation had security holes; see
809 <http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2006-11/0344.html>.
810 We don't expect that any tar archives in practical use have type 'N'
811 records, but if you have one and you trust its contents, you can
812 decode it with GNU tar 1.16 or earlier.
813
814 * Race conditions have been fixed that in some cases briefly allowed
815 files extracted by 'tar -x --same-owner' (or plain 'tar -x', when
816 running as root) to be accessed by users that they shouldn't have been.
817
818 \f
819 version 1.16 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-10-21
820
821 * After creating an archive, tar exits with code 1 if some files were
822 changed while being read. Previous versions exited with code 2 (fatal
823 error), and only if some files were truncated while being archived.
824
825 * New option --mtime allows to set modification times for all archive
826 members during creation.
827
828 * Bug fixes
829 ** Avoid running off file descriptors when using multiple -C options.
830 ** tar --index-file=FILE --file=- sent the archive to FILE, and
831 the listing to stderr.
832
833 \f
834 version 1.15.91 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-06-16
835
836 * Incompatible changes
837
838 ** Globbing
839
840 Previous versions of GNU tar assumed shell-style globbing when
841 extracting from or listing an archive. For example:
842
843 tar xf foo.tar '*.c'
844
845 would extract all files whose names end in '.c'. This behavior
846 was not documented and was incompatible with traditional tar
847 implementations. Therefore, starting from this version, GNU tar
848 no longer uses globbing by default. For example, the above invocation
849 is now interpreted as a request to extract from the archive the file
850 named '*.c'.
851
852 To treat member names as globbing patterns, use --wildcards option.
853 If you wish tar to mimic the behavior of versions up to 1.15.90,
854 add --wildcards to the value of the environment variable TAR_OPTIONS.
855
856 The exact way in which tar interprets member names is controlled by the
857 following command line options:
858
859 --wildcards use wildcards
860 --anchored patterns match file name start
861 --ignore-case ignore case
862 --wildcards-match-slash wildcards match '/'
863
864 Each of these options has a '--no-' counterpart that disables its
865 effect (e.g. --no-wildcards).
866
867 These options affect both the interpretation of member names from
868 command line and that of the exclusion patterns (given with --exclude
869 and --exclude-from options). The defaults are:
870
871 1. For member names: --no-wildcards --anchored
872 2. For exclusion patterns: --wildcards --no-anchored --wildcards-match-slash
873
874 The options can appear multiple times in the command line, thereby
875 changing the way command line arguments are interpreted. For example,
876 to use case-insensitive matching in exclude patterns and to revert to
877 case-sensitive matching for the rest of command line, one could write:
878
879 tar xf foo.tar --ignore-case --exclude-from=FILE --no-ignore-case file.name
880
881 ** Short option -l is now an alias of --check-links option, which complies
882 with UNIX98. This ends the transition period started with version 1.14.
883
884 * New features
885
886 ** New option --transform allows to transform file names before storing them
887 in the archive or member names before extracting. The option takes a
888 sed replace expression as its argument. For example,
889
890 tar cf foo.tar --transform 's,^,prefix/,'
891
892 will add 'prefix/' to all file names stored in foo.tar.
893
894 ** --strip-components option works when deleting and comparing. In previous
895 versions it worked only with --extract.
896
897 ** New option --show-transformed-names enables display of transformed file
898 or archive. It generalizes --show-stored-names option, introduced in
899 1.15.90. In particular, when creating an archive in verbose mode, it lists
900 member names as stored in the archive, i.e., with any eventual prefixes
901 removed and file name transformations applied. The option is useful,
902 for example, while comparing 'tar cv' and 'tar tv' outputs.
903
904 ** New incremental snapshot file format keeps information about file names
905 as well as that about directories.
906
907 ** The --checkpoint option takes an optional argument specifying the number
908 of records between the two successive checkpoints. Optional dot
909 starting the argument intructs tar to print dots instead of textual
910 checkpoints.
911
912 ** The --totals option can be used with any tar operation (previous versions
913 understood it only with --create). If an argument to this option is
914 given, it specifies the signal upon delivery of which the statistics
915 is to be printed. Both forms of this option (with and without
916 argument) can be given to in a single invocation of tar.
917
918 * Bug fixes
919 ** Detect attempts to update compressed archives.
920
921 \f
922 version 1.15.90 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-02-19
923
924 * New features
925
926 ** Any number of -T (--files-from) options may be used in the command line.
927 The file specified with -T may include any valid 'tar' options,
928 including another -T option.
929 Compatibility note: older versions of tar would only recognize -C
930 as an option name within the file list file. Now any file whose name
931 starts with - is handled as an option. To insert file names starting with
932 dash, use the --add-file option.
933
934 ** List files containing null-separated file names are detected and processed
935 automatically. It is no longer necessary to give the --null option.
936
937 ** New option --no-unquote disables the unquoting of input file names.
938 This is useful for processing output from 'find dir -print0'.
939 An orthogonal option --unquote is provided as well.
940
941 ** New option --test-label tests the archive volume label.
942 If an argument is specified, the label is compared against its value.
943 Tar exits with code 0 if the two strings match, and with code 2 if
944 they do not.
945
946 If no argument is given, the --verbose option is implied. In this case,
947 tar prints the label name if present and exits with code 0.
948
949 ** New option --show-stored-names. When creating an archive in verbose mode,
950 it lists member names as stored in the archive, i.e., with any eventual
951 prefixes removed. The option is useful, for example, while comparing
952 'tar cv' and 'tar tv' outputs.
953
954 ** New option --to-command pipes the contents of archive members to the
955 specified command.
956
957 ** New option --atime-preserve=system, which uses the O_NOATIME feature
958 of recent Linux kernels to avoid some problems when preserving file
959 access times.
960
961 ** New option --delay-directory-restore delays restoring modification times
962 and permissions of extracted directories until the end of extraction.
963 This is necessary for restoring from archives with unusual member
964 ordering (in particular, those created with --no-recursion option).
965 This option is implied when restoring from incremental archives.
966
967 ** New option --restrict prohibits use of some potentially harmful tar
968 options. Currently it disables '!' escape in multi-volume name menu.
969
970 ** New options --quoting-style and --quote-chars control the way tar
971 quotes member names on output. The --quoting-style takes an argument
972 specifying the quoting style to use (literal, shell, shell-always,
973 c, escape, locale, clocale). The argument to --quote-chars is a string
974 specifying characters to quote, even if the selected quoting style
975 would not quote them otherwise. The option --no-quote-chars is
976 provided to disable quoting certain characters.
977
978 ** The end-of-volume script (introduced with --info-script option) can
979 get current archive name from the environment variable TAR_ARCHIVE and
980 the volume number from the variable TAR_VOLUME. It can alter the
981 archive name by writing new name to the file descriptor 3.
982
983 ** Better support for full-resolution time stamps. Tar cannot restore
984 time stamps to full nanosecond resolution, though, until the kernel
985 guys get their act together and give us a system call to set file time
986 stamps to nanosecond resolution.
987
988 ** The -v option now prints time stamps only to 1-minute resolution,
989 not full resolution, to avoid using up too many output columns.
990 Nanosecond resolution is now supported, but that would be too much.
991
992 * Bug fixes
993
994 ** Allow non-option arguments to be interspersed with options.
995 ** When extracting or listing archives in old GNU format, tar
996 used to read an extra block of data after a long name header
997 if length of the member name was divisible by block size (512).
998 Consequently, the file pointer was set off and the next member
999 was not processed correctly.
1000 ** Previous version created invalid archives when files shrink
1001 during reading.
1002 ** Compare mode (tar d) hung when trying to compare file contents.
1003 ** Previous versions in certain cases failed to restore directory
1004 modification times.
1005 ** When creating an archive, do not attempt to store files whose
1006 meta-data cannot be stored in the header due to format limitations
1007 (for ustar and v7 formats).
1008 ** The --version option now also outputs information about copyright,
1009 license, and credits. This reverts to the behavior of tar 1.14 and
1010 earlier, and conforms to the GNU coding standards. The --license (-L)
1011 option introduced in tar 1.15 has been removed, since it's no longer
1012 needed.
1013
1014 \f
1015 version 1.15.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-12-21
1016
1017 This version fixes a bug introduced in 1.15 which caused
1018 tar to refuse to extract files from standard input.
1019
1020 \f
1021 version 1.15 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-12-20
1022
1023 * Compressed archives are recognised automatically, it is no longer
1024 necessary to specify -Z, -z, or -j options to read them. Thus, you can
1025 now run 'tar tf archive.tar.gz'.
1026
1027 * When restoring incremental dumps, --one-file-system option
1028 prevents directory hierarchies residing on different devices
1029 from being purged.
1030
1031 With the previous versions of tar it was dangerous to create
1032 incremental dumps with --one-file-system option, since they
1033 would recursively remove mount points when restoring from the
1034 back up. This change fixes the bug.
1035
1036 * Renamed --strip-path to --strip-components for consistency with
1037 the GNU convention.
1038
1039 * Skipping archive members is sped up if the archive media supports
1040 seeks.
1041
1042 * Restore script starts restoring only if it is given --all (-a) option,
1043 or some patterns. This is to prevent accidental restores.
1044
1045 * 'tar --verify' prints a warning if during archive creation some of
1046 the file names had their prefixes stripped off.
1047
1048 * New option --exclude-caches instructs tar to exclude cache directories
1049 automatically on archive creation. Cache directories are those
1050 containing a standardized tag file, as specified at:
1051
1052 http://www.brynosaurus.com/cachedir/spec.html
1053
1054 * New configure option --with-rmt allows to specify full path name to
1055 the 'rmt' utility. This supersedes DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND variable
1056 introduced in version 1.14
1057
1058 * New configure variable DEFAULT_RMT_DIR allows to specify the directory
1059 where to install 'rmt' utility. This is necessary since modifying
1060 --libexecdir as was suggested for version 1.14 produced a side effect: it
1061 also modified installation prefix for backup scripts (if
1062 --enable-backup-scripts was given).
1063
1064 * Bug fixes:
1065 ** Fixed flow in recognizing files to be included in incremental dumps.
1066 ** Correctly recognize sparse archive members when used with -T option.
1067 ** GNU multivolume headers cannot store filenames longer than 100 characters.
1068 Do not allow multivolume archives to begin with such filenames.
1069 ** If a member with link count > 2 was stored in the archive twice,
1070 previous versions of tar were not able to extract it, since they
1071 were trying to link the file to itself, which always failed and
1072 lead to removing the already extracted copy. Preserve the first
1073 extracted copy in such cases.
1074 ** Restore script was passing improper argument to tar --listed option (which
1075 didn't affect the functionality, but was logically incorrect).
1076 ** Fixed verification of created archives.
1077 ** Fixed unquoting of file names containing backslash escapes (previous
1078 versions failed to recognize \a and \v).
1079 ** When attempting to delete a non-existing member from the archive, previous
1080 versions of tar used to overwrite last archive block with zeroes.
1081
1082 \f
1083 version 1.14 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-05-11
1084
1085 * Added support for POSIX.1-2001 and ustar archive formats.
1086 * New option --format allows to select the output archive format
1087 * The default output format can be selected at configuration time
1088 by presetting the environment variable DEFAULT_ARCHIVE_FORMAT.
1089 Allowed values are GNU, V7, OLDGNU and POSIX.
1090 * New option --strip-path allows to cut off a given number of
1091 path elements from the name of the file being extracted.
1092
1093 * New options --index-file, --no-overwrite-dir. The --overwrite-dir
1094 option is now the default; use --no-overwrite-dir if you prefer
1095 the previous default behavior.
1096
1097 * The semantics of -o option is changed. When extracting, it
1098 does the same as --no-same-owner GNU tar option. This is compatible
1099 with UNIX98 tar. Otherwise, its effect is the same as that of
1100 --old-archive option. This latter is deprecated and will be removed
1101 in future.
1102
1103 * New option --check-links prints a message if not all links are dumped
1104 for a file being archived. This corresponds to the UNIX98 -l option.
1105 The current semantics of the -l option is retained for compatibility
1106 with previous releases, however such usage is strongly deprecated as
1107 the option will change to its UNIX98 semantics in the future releases.
1108
1109 * New option --occurrence[=N] can be used in conjunction with one of
1110 the subcommands --delete, --diff, --extract or --list when a list of
1111 files is given either on the command line or via -T option. This
1112 option instructs tar to process only the Nth occurrence of each named
1113 file. N defaults to 1, so 'tar -x -f archive --occurrence filename'
1114 extracts the first occurrence of 'filename' from 'archive'
1115 and terminates without scanning to the end of the archive.
1116
1117 * New option --pax-option allows to control the handling of POSIX
1118 keywords in 'pax' extended headers. It is equivalent to 'pax'
1119 -o option.
1120
1121 * --incremental and --listed-incremental options work correctly on
1122 individual files, as well as on directories.
1123
1124 * New scripts: backup (replaces old level-0 and level-1) and restore.
1125 The scripts are compiled and installed if --enable-backup-scripts
1126 option is given to configure.
1127
1128 * By default tar searches "rmt" utility in "$prefix/libexec/rmt",
1129 which is consistent with the location where the version of "rmt"
1130 included in the package is installed. Previous versions of tar
1131 used "/etc/rmt". To install "rmt" to its traditional location,
1132 run configure with option --libexecdir=/etc. Otherwise, if you
1133 already have rmt installed and wish to use it, instead of the
1134 shipped in version, set the variable DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND to
1135 the full path name of the utility, e.g., ./configure
1136 DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND=/etc/rmt.
1137
1138 Notice also that the full path name of the "rmt" utility to
1139 use can be set at runtime, by giving option --rmt-command to
1140 tar.
1141
1142 * Removed obsolete command line options:
1143 ** --absolute-paths superseded by --absolute-names
1144 ** --block-compress is not needed any longer
1145 ** --block-size superseded by --blocking-factor
1146 ** --modification-time superseded by --touch
1147 ** --read-full-blocks superseded by --read-full-records
1148 ** --record-number superseded by --block-number
1149 ** --version-control superseded by --backup
1150
1151 * New message translations fi (Finnish), gl (Galician), hr (Croatian),
1152 hu (Hungarian), ms (Malaysian), nb (Norwegian), ro (Romanian), sk
1153 (Slovak), zh_CN (Chinese simplified), zh_TW (Chinese traditional).
1154 The code 'no' for Norwegian (Bokmål) has been withdrawn; use 'nb' instead.
1155
1156 * Bug fixes.
1157
1158 \f
1159 version 1.13.25 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-26
1160
1161 * Bug fixes.
1162
1163 \f
1164 version 1.13.24 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-22
1165
1166 * New option --overwrite-dir.
1167 * Fixes for buffer overrun, porting, and copyright notice problems.
1168 * The message translations for Korean are available again.
1169
1170 \f
1171 version 1.13.23 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-13
1172
1173 * Bug, porting, and copyright notice fixes.
1174
1175 \f
1176 version 1.13.22 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-29
1177
1178 * Bug fixes.
1179
1180 \f
1181 version 1.13.21 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-28
1182
1183 * Porting and copyright notice fixes.
1184
1185 \f
1186 version 1.13.20 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-27
1187
1188 * Some bugs were fixed:
1189 - security problems
1190 - hard links to symbolic links
1191
1192 * New option --recursion (the default) that is the inverse of --no-recursion.
1193
1194 * New options --anchored, --ignore-case, --wildcards,
1195 --wildcards-match-slash, and their negations (e.g., --no-anchored).
1196 Along with --recursion and --no-recursion, these options control how
1197 exclude patterns are interpreted.
1198
1199 * The default interpretation of exclude patterns is now --no-anchored
1200 --no-ignore-case --recursion --wildcards --wildcards-match-slash.
1201 This is a quiet change to the semantics of --exclude. The previous
1202 semantics were a failed attempt at backward compatibility but it
1203 became clear that the semantics were puzzling and did not satisfy
1204 everybody. Rather than continue to try to revive that dead horse we
1205 thought it better to substitute cleaner semantics, with options so
1206 that you can change the behavior more to your liking.
1207
1208 * New message translations for Indonesian and Turkish.
1209 The translation for Korean has been withdrawn due to encoding errors.
1210 It will be reissued once those are fixed.
1211
1212 \f
1213 version 1.13.19 - Paul Eggert, 2001-01-13
1214
1215 * The -I option has been withdrawn, as it was buggy and confusing.
1216 Eventually it is planned to be reintroduced, with the same meaning as -T.
1217
1218 * With an option like -N DATE, if DATE starts with "/" or ".", it is taken
1219 to be a file name; the last-modified time of that file is used as the date.
1220
1221 \f
1222 version 1.13.18 - Paul Eggert, 2000-10-29
1223
1224 * Some security problems have been fixed. 'tar -x' now modifies only
1225 files under the working directory, unless you also specify an unsafe
1226 option like --absolute-names or --overwrite.
1227
1228 * The short name of the --bzip option has been changed to -j,
1229 and -I is now an alias for -T, for compatibility with Solaris tar.
1230
1231 * The manual is now distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
1232
1233 * The new environment variable TAR_OPTIONS holds default command-line options.
1234
1235 * The --no-recursion option now affects extraction too.
1236
1237 * The wording in some diagnostics has been changed slightly.
1238
1239 * Snapshot files now record whether each file was accessed via NFS.
1240 The new file format is upward- and downward-compatible with the old.
1241
1242 * New language supported: da.
1243
1244 * Compilation by traditional (K&R) C compilers is no longer supported.
1245 If you still use such a compiler, please use GCC instead.
1246
1247 * This version of tar works best with GNU gzip test version 1.3 or later.
1248 Please see <ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gzip/>.
1249
1250 * 'tar --delete -f -' now works again.
1251
1252 \f
1253 version 1.13.17 - Paul Eggert, 2000-01-07.
1254
1255 * 'tar --delete -f -' is no longer allowed; it was too buggy.
1256 * Diagnostic messages have been made more regular and consistent.
1257
1258 \f
1259 version 1.13.16 - Paul Eggert, 1999-12-13.
1260
1261 * By default, tar now refuses to overwrite an existing file when
1262 extracting files from an archive; instead, it removes the file
1263 before extracting it. If the existing file is a symbolic link, the
1264 link is removed and not the pointed-to file. There is one
1265 exception: existing nonempty directories are not removed, nor are
1266 their ownerships or permissions extracted. This fixes some
1267 longstanding security problems.
1268
1269 The new --overwrite option enables the old default behavior.
1270
1271 For regular files, tar implements this change by using the O_EXCL
1272 option of 'open' to ensure that it creates the file; if this fails, it
1273 removes the file and tries again. This is similar to the behavior of
1274 the --unlink-first option, but it is faster in the common case of
1275 extracting a new directory.
1276
1277 * By default, tar now ignores file names containing a component of '..'
1278 when extracting, and warns about such file names when creating an archive.
1279 To enable the old behavior, use the -P or --absolute-names option.
1280
1281 * Tar now handles file names with multibyte encodings (e.g., UTF-8, Shift-JIS)
1282 correctly. It relies on the mbrtowc function to handle multibyte characters.
1283
1284 * The file generated by -g or --listed-incremental now uses a format
1285 that is independent of locale, so that users need not worry about
1286 locale when restoring a backup. This is needed for proper support
1287 of multibyte characters. Old-format files can still be read, and
1288 older versions of GNU tar can read new-format files, unless member
1289 names have multibyte chars.
1290
1291 * Many diagnostics have been changed slightly, so that file names are
1292 now output unambiguously. File names in diagnostics now are either
1293 `quoted like this' (in the default C locale) or are followed by
1294 colon, newline, or space, depending on context. Unprintable
1295 characters are escaped with a C-like backslash conventions.
1296 Terminating characters (e.g., close-quote, colon, newline)
1297 are also escaped as needed.
1298
1299 * tar now ignores socket files when creating an archive.
1300 Previously tar archived sockets as fifos, which caused problems.
1301
1302 \f
1303 version 1.13.15 - Paul Eggert, 1999-12-03.
1304
1305 * If a file's ctime changes when being archived, report an error.
1306 Previously tar looked at mtime, which missed some errors.
1307
1308 \f
1309 version 1.13.14 - Paul Eggert, 1999-11-07.
1310
1311 * New translations ja, pt_BR.
1312 * New options --help and --version for rmt.
1313 * Ignore Solaris door files when creating an archive.
1314
1315 \f
1316 version 1.13.13 - Paul Eggert, 1999-10-11.
1317
1318 * Invalid headers in tar files now elicit errors, not just warnings.
1319 * 'tar --version' output conforms to the latest GNU coding standards.
1320 * If you specify an invalid date, 'tar' now substitutes (time_t) -1.
1321 * 'configure --with-dmalloc' is no longer available.
1322
1323 \f
1324 version 1.13.12 - Paul Eggert, 1999-09-24.
1325
1326 * 'tar' now supports hard links to symbolic links.
1327
1328 * New options --no-same-owner, --no-same-permissions.
1329
1330 * --total now also outputs a human-readable size, and a throughput value.
1331
1332 * 'tar' now uses two's-complement base-256 when outputting header
1333 values that are out of the range of the standard unsigned base-8
1334 format. This affects archive members with negative or huge time
1335 stamps or uids, and archive members 8 GB or larger. The new tar
1336 archives cannot be read by traditional tar, or by older versions of
1337 GNU tar. Use the --old-archive option to revert to the old
1338 behavior, which uses unportable representations for negative values,
1339 and which rejects large files.
1340
1341 * On 32-bit hosts, 'tar' now assumes that an incoming time stamp T in
1342 the range 2**31 <= T < 2**32 represents the negative time (T -
1343 2**32). This behavior is nonstandard and is not portable to 64-bit
1344 time_t hosts, so 'tar' issues a warning.
1345
1346 * 'tar' no longer gives up extracting immediately upon discovering
1347 that an archive contains garbage at the end. It attempts to extract
1348 as many files as possible from the good data before the garbage.
1349
1350 * A read error now causes a nonzero exit status, not just a warning.
1351
1352 * Some diagnostics have been reworded for consistency.
1353
1354 \f
1355 version 1.13.11 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-23.
1356
1357 * The short name of the --bzip option has been changed to -I,
1358 for compatibility with paxutils.
1359
1360 * -T /dev/null now matches nothing; previously, it matched anything
1361 if no explicit operands were given.
1362
1363 * The '--' option now works the same as with other GNU utilities;
1364 it causes later operands to be interpreted as file names, not options,
1365 even if they begin with '-'.
1366
1367 * For the --newer and --after-date options, the table of time zone
1368 abbreviations like 'EST' has been updated to match current practice.
1369 Also, local time abbreviations are now recognized, even if they are
1370 not in tar's hardwired table. Remember, though, that you should use
1371 numeric UTC offsets like '-0500' instead of abbreviations like
1372 'EST', as abbreviations are not standardized and are ambiguous.
1373
1374 \f
1375 version 1.13.10 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-20.
1376
1377 * 'tar' now uses signed base-64 when outputting header values that are
1378 out of the range of the standard unsigned base-8 format. [This
1379 change was superseded in 1.13.12, described above.]
1380
1381 \f
1382 version 1.13.9 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-18.
1383
1384 * 'tar' now writes two zero blocks at end-of-archive instead of just one.
1385 POSIX.1 requires this, and some other 'tar' implementations check for it.
1386
1387 * 'tar' no longer silently accepts a block containing nonzero checksum bytes
1388 as a zero block.
1389
1390 * 'tar' now reads buggy tar files that have a null byte at the start of a
1391 numeric header field.
1392
1393 \f
1394 version 1.13.8 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-16.
1395
1396 * For compatibility with traditional 'tar', intermediate directories
1397 created automatically by root are no longer given the uid and gid of
1398 the original file or directory.
1399
1400 \f
1401 version 1.13.7 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-14.
1402
1403 * --listed-incremental and --newer are now incompatible options.
1404
1405 * When creating an archive, leading './' is no longer stripped,
1406 to match traditional tar's behavior (and simplify the documentation).
1407
1408 * --diff without --absolute-names no longer falls back on absolute names.
1409
1410 \f
1411 version 1.13.6 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-11.
1412
1413 * An --exclude pattern containing / now excludes a file only if it matches an
1414 initial prefix of the file name; a pattern without / continues to
1415 exclude a file if it matches any file name component.
1416
1417 * The protocol for talking to rmt has been extended slightly.
1418 Open flags are now communicated in symbolic format as well as numeric.
1419 The symbolic format (e.g., "O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC") is for portability
1420 when rmt is operating on a different operating system from tar.
1421 The numeric format is retained, and rmt uses it if symbolic format is absent,
1422 for backward compatibility with older versions of tar and rmt.
1423
1424 * When writing GNU tar format headers, tar now uses signed base-64
1425 for values that cannot be represented in unsigned octal.
1426 This supports larger files (2**66 - 1 bytes instead of 2**33 - 1 bytes),
1427 larger uids, negative time stamps, etc.
1428
1429 * When extracting files with unknown ownership, tar now looks up the
1430 uid and gid "nobody" on hosts whose headers do not define UID_NOBODY
1431 and GID_NOBODY, and falls back on uid/gid -2 if there is no "nobody".
1432
1433 * tar -t --numeric-owner now prints numeric uids and gids, not symbolic.
1434
1435 * New option -y or --bzip2 for bzip2 compression, by popular request.
1436
1437 \f
1438 version 1.13.5 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-20.
1439
1440 * Do the delayed updates of file metadata even after a fatal error.
1441
1442 \f
1443 version 1.13.4 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-20.
1444
1445 * Do not chmod unless we are root or the -p option was given;
1446 this matches historical practice.
1447
1448 \f
1449 version 1.13.3 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-16.
1450
1451 * A path name is excluded if any of its file name components matches an
1452 excluded pattern, even if the path name was specified on the command line.
1453 Also see 1.13.6 for later changes in this area.
1454
1455 \f
1456 version 1.13.2 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-14.
1457
1458 * Bug reporting address changed to <bug-tar@gnu.org>.
1459
1460 \f
1461 version 1.13.1 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-12.
1462
1463 * Bug fixes only.
1464 \f
1465 version 1.13 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-08.
1466
1467 * Support for large files, e.g., files larger than 2 GB on many 32-bit hosts.
1468 Also, support for larger uids, device ids, etc.
1469 * Many bug fixes and porting fixes.
1470 * This release is only for fixes. A more ambitious test release,
1471 with new features, is available as part of the paxutils. Please see:
1472 ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/paxutils/
1473 The fixes in this release are intended to be merged with paxutils
1474 at some point, but they haven't been merged yet.
1475 * An interim GNU tar alpha had new --bzip2 and --ending-file options,
1476 but they have been removed to maintain compatibility with paxutils.
1477 Please try --use=bzip2 instead of --bzip2.
1478 \f
1479 Version 1.12 - François Pinard, 1997-04.
1480
1481 Sensitive matters
1482 * Use shell globbing patterns for --label, instead of regular expressions.
1483 * Do not quote anymore internally over the quoting done by the shell.
1484
1485 Output for humans
1486 * Offer internationalization capabilities of most recent GNU gettext.
1487 * Messages available in many more languages, thanks to all translators!
1488 * Usage of ISO 8601 dates in listings, instead of local American dates.
1489 * More normalization and cleanup in error messages.
1490
1491 Creation
1492 * For helping using tar with find, offer a --no-recursion option.
1493 * Implement --numeric-owner for ignoring symbolic names at create time.
1494 * New --owner, --group --mode options, still preliminary.
1495 * Recognize creating an archive on /dev/null, so Amanda works faster.
1496 * Object to the creation of an empty archive (like in 'tar cf FILE').
1497 * Barely start implementing --posix and POSIXLY_CORRECT.
1498
1499 Extraction
1500 * Make a better job at restoring file and directory attributes.
1501 * Automatically attempt deleting existing files when in the way.
1502 * Option --unlink-first (-U) removes most files prior to extraction.
1503 * Option --recursive-unlink removes non-empty directories when in the way.
1504 * Option --numeric-owner ignores owner/group names, it uses UID/GID instead.
1505 * Use global umask when creating missing intermediate directories.
1506 * When symlinks are not available, extract symbolic links as hard links.
1507 * Diagnose extraction of contiguous files as regular files.
1508 * New --backup, --suffix and --version-control options.
1509
1510 Various changes
1511 * Better support of huge archives with --tape-length and --totals.
1512 * Rename option --read-full-blocks (-B) to --read-full-records (-B).
1513 * Rename option --block-size (-b) to --blocking-factor (-b).
1514 * Rename option --record-number (-R) to --block-number (-R).
1515 * With --block-number (-R), report null blocks and end of file.
1516 * Implement --record-size for introducing a size in bytes.
1517 * Delete --block-compress option and rather decide it automatically.
1518 * Rename option --modification-time to --touch.
1519
1520 Many bugs are squashed, while others still run free.
1521 \f
1522 Version 1.11.8 - François Pinard, 1995-06.
1523
1524 * Messages available in French, German, Portuguese and Swedish.
1525 * The distribution provides a rudimentary Texinfo manual.
1526 * The device defaults to stdin/stdout, unless overridden by the installer.
1527 * Option --sparse (-S) should work on more systems.
1528 * Option --rsh-command may select an alternative remote shell program.
1529
1530 Most changes are internal, and should yield better portability.
1531 \f
1532 Version 1.11.2 - Michael Bushnell, 1993-03.
1533
1534 * Changes in backup scripts: cleaned up considerably; notices error
1535 conditions better over rsh; DUMP_REMIND_SCRIPT is now an option in
1536 backup-specs; new file dump-remind is an example of a
1537 DUMP_REMIND_SCRIPT.
1538
1539 * Superfluous "Reading dirname" was a bug; fixed.
1540
1541 * Incompatibility problems with a bug on Solaris are fixed.
1542
1543 * New option --gzip (aliases are --ungzip and -z); calls gzip instead
1544 of compress. Also, --use-compress-program lets you specify any
1545 compress program. --compress-block is renamed --block-compress and
1546 now requires one of the three compression options to be specified.
1547
1548 * Several error messages are cleaned up.
1549
1550 * Directory owners are now set properly when running as root.
1551
1552 * Provide DUMP_REMIND_SCRIPT in backup-specs as a possible option
1553 for --info-script.
1554
1555 * Behave better with broken rmt servers.
1556
1557 * Dump scripts no longer use --atime-preserve; this causes a nasty probem.
1558
1559 * Several Makefile cleanups.
1560 \f
1561 Version 1.11.1 - Michael Bushnell, 1992-09.
1562
1563 * Many bug fixes.
1564 \f
1565 Version 1.11 - Michael Bushnell, 1992-09.
1566 Version 1.10.16 - 1992-07.
1567 Version 1.10.15 - 1992-06.
1568 Version 1.10.14 - 1992-05.
1569 Version 1.10.13 - 1992-01.
1570
1571 * Many bug fixes.
1572
1573 * Now uses GNU standard configure, generated by Autoconf.
1574
1575 * Long options now use '--'; use of '+' is deprecated and support
1576 for it will eventually be removed.
1577
1578 * New option --null causes filenames read by -T to be
1579 null-terminated, and causes -C to be ignored.
1580
1581 * New option --remove-files deletes files (but not directories)
1582 after they are added to the archive.
1583
1584 * New option --ignore-failed-read prevents read-errors from affecting
1585 the exit status.
1586
1587 * New option --checkpoint prints occasional messages as the tape
1588 is being read or written.
1589
1590 * New option --show-omitted-dirs prints the names of directories
1591 omitted from the archive.
1592
1593 * Some tape drives which use a non-standard method of indicating
1594 end-of-tape now work correctly with multi-tape archives.
1595
1596 * --volno-file: Read the volume number used in prompting the user
1597 (but not in recording volume ID's on the archive) from a file.
1598
1599 * When using --multi-volume, you can now give multiple -f arguments;
1600 the various tape drives will get used in sequence and then wrap
1601 around to the beginning.
1602
1603 * Remote archive names no longer have to be in /dev: any file with a
1604 ':' is interpreted as remote. If new option --force-local is given,
1605 then even archive files with a ':' are considered local.
1606
1607 * New option --atime-preserve restores (if possible) atimes to
1608 their original values after dumping the file.
1609
1610 * No longer does tar confusingly dump "." when you don't tell it
1611 what to dump.
1612
1613 * When extracting directories, tar now correctly restores their
1614 modification and access times.
1615
1616 * Longnames support is redone differently--long name info directly
1617 precedes the long-named file or link in the archive, so you no
1618 longer have to wait for the extract to hit the end of the tape for
1619 long names to work.
1620 \f
1621 Version 1.10 - Michael Bushnell, 1991-07.
1622
1623 * Filename to -G is optional. -C works right. Names +newer and
1624 +newer-mtime work right.
1625
1626 * -g is now +incremental, -G is now +listed-incremental.
1627
1628 * Sparse files now work correctly.
1629
1630 * +volume is now called +label.
1631
1632 * +exclude now takes a filename argument, and +exclude-from does
1633 what +exclude used to do.
1634
1635 * Exit status is now correct.
1636
1637 * +totals keeps track of total I/O and prints it when tar exits.
1638
1639 * When using +label with +extract, the label is now a regexp.
1640
1641 * New option +tape-length (-L) does multi-volume handling like BSD
1642 dump: you tell tar how big the tape is and it will prompt at that
1643 point instead of waiting for a write error.
1644
1645 * New backup scripts level-0 and level-1 which might be useful
1646 to people. They use a file "backup-specs" for information, and
1647 shouldn't need local modification. These are what we use to do
1648 all our backups at the FSF.
1649 \f
1650 Version 1.09 - Jay Fenlason, 1990-10.
1651 Version 1.08 - Jay Fenlason, 1990-01.
1652 Versions 1.07 back to 1.00 by Jay Fenlason.
1653
1654 * See ChangeLog for more details.
1655
1656 \f
1657
1658 Copyright 1994-2001, 2003-2010, 2013-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
1659
1660 This file is part of GNU tar.
1661
1662 GNU tar is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
1663 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
1664 the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
1665 (at your option) any later version.
1666
1667 GNU tar is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
1668 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
1669 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
1670 GNU General Public License for more details.
1671
1672 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
1673 along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
1674 \f
1675 Local variables:
1676 mode: outline
1677 paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$"
1678 eval: (add-hook 'write-file-hooks 'time-stamp)
1679 time-stamp-start: "changes. "
1680 time-stamp-format: "%:y-%02m-%02d"
1681 time-stamp-end: "\n"
1682 end: