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NEWS
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GNU tar NEWS - User visible changes. 2021-02-13
Please send GNU tar bug reports to <[email protected]>
version 1.34 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2021-02-13
* Fix extraction over pipe (savannah bug #60002)
* Fix memory leak in read_header (savannah bug #59897)
* Fix extraction when . and .. are unreadable
See https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-tar/2021-01/msg00012.html
* Gracefully handle duplicate symlinks when extracting
See https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-tar/2021-01/msg00026.html
* Re-initialize supplementary groups when switching to user privileges
version 1.33 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2021-01-07
* POSIX extended format headers do not include PID by default
The intent is to make binary-equivalent PAX archives easy to create. If
POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, the POSIX standard default is used, which embeds
the pid.
* --delay-directory-restore works for archives with reversed member ordering
* Fix extraction of a symbolic link hardlinked to another symbolic link
* Wildcards in exclude-vcs-ignore mode don't match slash
* Fix the --no-overwrite-dir option
Given this option, previous versions of tar failed to preserve
permissions of empty directories and to create files under directories
owned by the current user that did not have the S_IWUSR bit set.
* Fix handling of chained renames in incremental backups
* Link counting works for file names supplied with -T
* Accept only position-sensitive (file-selection) options in file list files.
Using such options as -f, -z, etc. is senseless in a file list file and
bypasses option consistency checks in decode_options. Therefore,
only options related to file selection (a.k.a position-sensitive options)
are allowed in file list files.
version 1.32 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2019-02-23
* Fix the use of --checkpoint without explicit --checkpoint-action
* Fix extraction with the -U option
See http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-tar/2019-01/msg00015.html,
for details
* Fix iconv usage on BSD-based systems
* Fix possible NULL dereference (savannah bug #55369)
* Improve the testsuite
version 1.31 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2019-01-02
* Fix heap-buffer-overrun with --one-top-level.
Bug introduced with the addition of that option in 1.28.
* Support for zstd compression
New option '--zstd' instructs tar to use zstd as compression program.
When listing, extractng and comparing, zstd compressed archives are
recognized automatically.
When '-a' option is in effect, zstd compression is selected if the
destination archive name ends in '.zst' or '.tzst'.
* The -K option interacts properly with member names given in the command line
Names of members to extract can be specified along with the "-K NAME"
option. In this case, tar will extract NAME and those of named members
that appear in the archive after it, which is consistent with the
semantics of the option.
Previous versions of tar extracted NAME, those of named members that
appeared before it, and everything after it.
* Fix CVE-2018-20482
When creating archives with the --sparse option, previous versions of
tar would loop endlessly if a sparse file had been truncated while
being archived.
version 1.30 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2017-12-17
* Member names containing '..' components are now skipped when extracting.
This fixes tar's behavior to match its documentation, and is a bit
safer when extracting untrusted archives over old files (an unsafe
practice that the tar manual has long recommended against).
* Report erroneous use of position-sensitive options.
During archive creation or update, tar keeps track of positional
options (see the manual, subsection 3.4.4 "Position-Sensitive
Options"), and reports those that had no effect. For example, when
invoked as
tar -cf a.tar . --exclude '*.o'
tar will create the archive, but will exit with status 2, having
issued the following error message
tar: The following options were used after non-optional
arguments in archive create or update mode. These options are
positional and affect only arguments that follow them. Please,
rearrange them properly.
tar: --exclude '*.o' has no effect
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
* --numeric-owner now affects private headers too.
This helps the output of 'tar' to be more deterministic.
* Fixed the --delay-directory-restore option
In some cases tar would restore the directory permissions too early,
causing subsequent link extractions in that directory to fail.
* The --warnings=failed-read option
This new warning control option suppresses warning messages about
unreadable files and directories. It has effect only if used together
with the --ignore-failed-read option.
* The --warnings=none option now suppresses all warnings
This includes warnings about unreadable files produced when
--ignore-failed-read is in effect. To output these, use
--warnings=none --warnings=no-failed-read.
* Fix reporting of hardlink mismatches during compare
Tar reported incorrect target file name in the 'Not linked to'
diagnostic message.
version 1.29 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2016-05-16
* New options: --verbatim-files-from, --no-verbatim-files-from
The --verbatim-files-from option instructs tar to treat each line read
from a file list as a file name, even if it starts with a dash.
File lists are supplied with the --files-from (-T) option. By
default, each line read from a file list is first stripped off the
leading and trailing whitespace and, if the result begins with a dash,
it is treated as tar command line option.
Use the --verbatim-files-from option to disable this special handling.
This facilitates the use of tar with file lists created automatically
(e.g. by find(1) command).
This option affects all --files-from options that occur after it in
the command line. Its effect is reverted by the
--no-verbatim-files-from option.
* --null option reads file names verbatim
The --null option implies --verbatim-files-from. I.e. each line
read from null-delimited file lists is treated as a file name.
This restores the documented behavior, which was broken in version
1.27.
* New options: --owner-map=FILE and --group-map=FILE
These two options provide fine-grained control over what user/group
names (or IDs) should be mapped when adding files to archive.
For both options, FILE is a plain text file with user or group
mappings. Empty lines are ignored. Comments are introduced with
# sign (unless quoted) and extend to the end of the corresponding
line. Each non-empty line defines translation for a single UID (GID).
It must consist of two fields, delimited by any amount of whitespace:
OLDNAME NEWNAME[:NEWID]
OLDNAME is either a valid user (group) name or a ID prefixed with +. Unless
NEWID is supplied, NEWNAME must also be either a valid name or a
+ID. Otherwise, both NEWNAME and NEWID need not be listed in the
system user database.
* New option --clamp-mtime
The new --clamp-mtime option changes the behavior of --mtime to only
use the time specified if the file mtime is newer than the given time.
The --clamp-mtime option can only be used together with --mtime.
Typical use case is to make builds reproducible: to loose less
information, it's better to keep the original date of an archive,
except for files modified during the build process. In that case, using
reference (and thus reproducible) timestamps for the latter is good
enough.
See <https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds> for more information.
* Deprecated --preserve option removed
* Sparse file detection
Tar now uses SEEK_DATA/SEEK_HOLE on systems that support it. This
allows for considerable speed-up in sparse-file detection.
New option --hole-detection is provided, that allows the user to
select the algorithm used for hole detection. Available arguments
are:
--hole-detection=seek
Use lseek(2) SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE "whence" parameters.
--hole-detection=raw
Scan entire file before storing it to determine where holes
are located.
The default is to use "seek" whenever possible, and fall back to
"raw" otherwise.
version 1.28, 2014-07-28
* New checkpoint action: totals
The --checkpoint-action=totals option instructs tar to output the
total number of bytes transferred at each checkpoint.
* Extended checkpoint format specification.
New conversion specifiers are implemented. Some of them take
optional arguments, supplied in curly braces between the percent
sign and the specifier letter.
%d - Number of seconds since tar started.
%{r,w,d}T - I/O totals; optional arguments supply prefixes
to be used before number of bytes read, written and
deleted, correspondingly.
%{FMT}t - Current local time using FMT as strftime(3) format.
If {FMT} is omitted, use %c.
%{N}* - Pad output with spaces to the Nth column, or to the
current screen width, if {N} is not given.
%c - A shortcut for "%{%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S}t: %ds, %{read,wrote}T%*\r"
* New option --one-top-level
The option --one-top-level tells tar to extract all files into a
subdirectory named by the base name of the archive (minus standard
compression suffixes recognizable by --auto-compress). When used with
an argument, as in --one-top-level=DIR, the files are extracted into the
supplied DIRectory. This ensures that no archive members are
extracted outside of the specified directory, even if the archive is
crafted so as to put them elsewhere.
* New option --sort
The --sort=ORDER option instructs tar to sort directory entries
according to ORDER. It takes effect when creating archives.
Available ORDERs are: none (the default), name and inode. The
latter may be absent, if the underlying system does not provide
the necessary information.
Using --sort=name ensures the member ordering in the created archive
is uniform and reproducible. Using --sort=inode reduces the number
of disk seeks made when creating the archive and thus can considerably
speed up archivation.
* New exclusion options
--exclude-ignore=FILE Before dumping a directory check if it
contains FILE, and if so read exclude
patterns for this directory from FILE.
--exclude-ignore-recursive=FILE
Same as above, but the exclusion patterns
read from FILE remain in effect for any
subdirectory, recursively.
--exclude-vcs-ignores Read exclude tags from VCS ignore files,
where such files exist. Supported VCS's
are: CVS, Git, Bazaar, Mercurial.
* Tar refuses to read input from and write output to a tty device.
* Manpages
This release includes official tar(1) and rmt(8) manpages.
Distribution maintainers are kindly asked to use these instead of the
home-made pages they have been providing so far.
version 1.27.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2013-11-17
* Bug fixes
* Fix unquoting of file names obtained via the -T option.
* Fix GNU long link header timestamp (backward compatibility).
* Fix extracting sparse members from star archives.
version 1.27 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2013-10-05
* Bug fixes
** Sparse files with large data
When creating a PAX-format archive, tar no longer arbitrarily restricts
the size of the representation of a sparse file to be less than 8 GiB.
* Quoting
In the default C locale, diagnostics and output of 'tar' have been
adjusted to quote 'like this' (with apostrophes) instead of `like this'
(with an accent grave character and an apostrophe). This tracks
recent changes to the GNU coding standards.
* --owner and --group names and numbers
The --owner and --group options now accept operands of the form
NAME:NUM, so that you can specify both symbolic name and numeric ID
for owner and group. In these options, NAME no longer needs to be
present in the current host's user and group databases.
* The --keep-old-files and --skip-old-files options.
This release restores the traditional functionality of the
--keep-old-files. This option causes tar to avoid replacing
existing files while extracting and to treat such files as errors.
Tar will emit a prominent error message upon encountering such files
and will exit with code 2 when finished extracting the archive.
A new option --skip-old-files is introduced, which acts exactly as
--keep-old-files, except that it does not treat existing files as
errors. Instead it just silently skips them. An additional level of
verbosity can be obtained by using the option --warning=existing-file
together with this option.
* Support for POSIX ACLs, extended attributes and SELinux context.
Starting with this version tar is able to store, extract and list
extended file attributes, POSIX.1e ACLs and SELinux context. This is
controlled by the command line options --xattrs, --acls and --selinux,
correspondingly. Each of these options has a `--no-' counterpart
(e.g. --no-xattrs), which disables the corresponding feature.
Additionally, the options --xattrs-include and --xattrs-exclude allow
you to selectively control for which files to store (or extract) the
extended attributes.
* Passing command line arguments to external commands.
Any option taking a command name as its argument now accepts a full
command line as well. Thus, it is now possible to pass additional
arguments to invoked programs. The affected options are:
--checkpoint-action=exec
-I, --use-compress-program
-F, --info-script
--to-command
Furthermore, if any additional information is supplied to such a
command via environment variables, these variables can now be used in
the command line itself. Care should be taken to escape them, to
prevent from being expanded too early, for example:
tar -x -f a.tar --info-script='changevol $TAR_ARCHIVE $TAR_VOLUME'
* New configure option --enable-gcc-warnings, intended for debugging.
* New warning control option --warning=[no-]record-size
On extraction, this option controls whether to display actual record
size, if it differs from the default.
* New command line option --keep-directory-symlink
By default, if trying to extract a directory from the archive,
tar discovers that the corresponding file name already exists and is a
symbolic link, it first unlinks the entry, and then extracts the directory.
This option disables this behavior and instructs tar to follow
symlinks to directories when extracting from the archive.
It is mainly intended to provide compatibility with the Slackware
installation scripts.
version 1.26 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2011-03-12
* Bugfixes
** Fix the --verify option, which broke in version 1.24.
** Fix storing long sparse file names in PAX archives.
** Fix correctness of --atime-preserve=replace
tar --atime-preserve=replace no longer tries to restore atime of
zero-sized files.
** Work around POSIX incompatibilities on FreeBSD, NetBSD and Tru64
** Fix bug with --one-file-system --listed-incremental
When invoked with these two options, tar 1.25 would add only the
top-level directory to the archive, but not its contents.
version 1.25 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-11-07
* Fix extraction of empty directories with the -C option in effect.
* Fix extraction of device nodes.
* Make sure name matching occurs before eventual name transformation.
Tar 1.24 changed the ordering of name matching and name transformation
so that the former saw already transformed file names. This made it
impossible to match file names in certain cases. It is fixed now.
* Fix the behavior of tar -x --overwrite on hosts lacking O_NOFOLLOW.
* Improve the testsuite.
* Alternative decompression programs.
If extraction from a compressed archive fails because the corresponding
compression program is not installed and the following two conditions
are met, tar retries extraction using an alternative decompressor:
1. Another compression program supported by tar is able to handle this
compression format.
2. The compression program was not explicitly requested in the command
line by the use of such options as -z, -j, etc.
For example, if 'compress' is not available, tar will try 'gzip'.
version 1.24 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-10-24
* The --full-time option.
New command line option '--full-time' instructs tar to output file
time stamps to the full resolution.
* Bugfixes.
** More reliable directory traversal when creating archives
Tar now checks for inconsistencies caused when a file system is
modified while tar is creating an archive. In the new approach, tar
maintains a cache of file descriptors to directories, so it uses more
file descriptors than before, but it adjusts to system limits on
the number of file descriptors. Tar also takes more care when
a file system is modified while tar is extracting from an archive.
The new checks are implemented via the openat and related calls
standardized by POSIX.1-2008. On an older system where these calls do
not exist or do not return useful results, tar emulates the calls at
some cost in efficiency and reliability.
** Symbolic link attributes
When extracting symbolic links, tar now restores attributes such as
last-modified time and link permissions, if the operating system
supports this. For example, recent versions of the Linux kernel
support setting times on symlinks, and some BSD kernels also support
symlink permissions.
** --dereference consistency
The --dereference (-h) option now applies to files that are copied
into or out of archives, independently of other options. For example,
if F is a symbolic link and archive.tar contains a regular-file member
also named F, "tar --overwrite -x -f archive.tar F" now overwrites F
itself, rather than the file that F points to. (To overwrite the file
that F points to, add the --dereference (-h) option.) Formerly,
--dereference was intended to apply only when using the -c option, but
the implementation was not consistent.
Also, the --dereference option no longer affects accesses to other
files, such as archives and time stamp files. Symbolic links to these
files are always followed. Previously, the links were usually but not
always followed.
** Spurious error diagnostics on broken pipe.
When receiving SIGPIPE, tar would exit with error status and
"write error" diagnostics. In particular, this occurred if
invoked as in the example below:
tar tf archive.tar | head -n 1
** --remove-files
'tar --remove-files' failed to remove a directory which contained
symlinks to another files within that directory.
** --test-label behavior
In case of a mismatch, 'tar --test-label LABEL' exits with code 1,
not 2 as it did in previous versions.
The '--verbose' option used with '--test-label' provides additional
diagnostics.
Several volume labels may be specified in a command line, e.g.:
tar --test-label -f archive 'My volume' 'New volume' 'Test volume'
In this case, tar exits with code 0 if any one of the arguments
matches the actual volume label.
** --label used with --update
The '--label' option can be used with '--update' to prevent accidental
update of an archive:
tar -rf archive --label 'My volume' .
This did not work in previous versions, in spite of what the docs said.
** --record-size and --tape-length (-L) options
Usual size suffixes are allowed for these options. For example,
-L10k stands for a 10 kilobyte tape length.
** Fix dead loop on extracting existing symlinks with the -k option.
version 1.23 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-03-10
* Record size autodetection
When listing or extracting archives, the actual record size is
reported only if the archive is read from a device (as opposed
to regular files and pipes).
* Seekable archives
When a read-only operation (e.g. --list or --extract) is requested
on a regular file, tar attemtps to speed up accesses by using lseek.
* New command line option '--warning'
The '--warning' command line option allows to suppress or enable
particular warning messages during 'tar' run. It takes a single
argument (a 'keyword'), identifying the class of warning messages
to affect. If the argument is prefixed with 'no-', such warning
messages are suppressed. For example,
tar --warning=no-alone-zero-block -x -f archive
suppresses the output of "A lone zero block" diagnostics, which is
normally issued if 'archive' ends with a single block of zeros.
See Tar Manual, section 3.9 "Controlling Warning Messages", for a
detailed discussion.
* New command line option '--level'
The '--level=N' option sets the incremental dump level N. It
is valid when used in conjunction with the -c and --listed-incremental
options. So far the only meaningful value for N is 0. The
'--level=0' option forces creating the level 0 dump, by truncating
the snapshot file if it exists.
* Files removed during incremental dumps
If a file or directory is removed while incremental dump is
in progress, tar exact actions depend on whether this file
was explicitly listed in the command line, or was found
during file system scan.
If the file was explicitly listed in the command line, tar
issues error message and exits with the code 2, meaning
fatal error.
Otherwise, if the file was found during the file system scan,
tar issues a warning, saying "File removed before we read it",
and sets exit code to 1, which means "some files differ".
If the --warning=no-file-removed option is given, no warning
is issued and exit code remains 0.
* Modification times of PAX extended headers.
Modification times in ustar header blocks of extended headers
are set to mtimes of the corresponding archive members. This
can be overridden by the
--pax-option='exthdr.mtime=STRING'
command line option. The STRING is either number of seconds since
the Epoch or a "Time reference" (see below).
Modification times in ustar header blocks of global extended
headers are set to the time when tar was invoked.
This can be overridden by the
--pax-option='globexthdr.mtime=STRING'
command line option. The STRING is either number of seconds since
the Epoch or a "Time reference" (see below).
* Time references in --pax-option argument.
Any value from the --pax-option argument that is enclosed in a pair
of curly braces represents a time reference. The string between the
braces is understood either as a textual time representation, as described in
chapter 7, "Date input formats", of the Tar manual, or as a name of
an existing file, starting with '/' or '.'. In the latter
case, it is replaced with the modification time of that file.
* Environment of --to-command script.
The environment passed to the --to-command script is extended with
the following variables:
TAR_VERSION GNU tar version number
TAR_ARCHIVE The name of the archive
TAR_VOLUME Ordinal number of the volume
TAR_FORMAT Format of the archive
TAR_BLOCKING_FACTOR Current blocking factor
* Bugfixes
** Fix handling of hard link targets by -c --transform.
** Fix hard links recognition with -c --remove-files.
** Fix restoring files from backup (debian bug #508199).
** Correctly restore modes and permissions on existing directories.
** The --remove-files option removes files only if they were
succesfully stored in the archive.
** Fix storing and listing of the volume labels in POSIX format.
** Improve algorithm for splitting long file names (ustar
format).
** Fix possible memory overflow in the rmt client code (CVE-2010-0624).
version 1.22 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2009-03-05
* Support for xz compression
Tar uses xz for compression if one of the following conditions is met:
1. The option --xz or -J (see below) is used.
2. The xz binary is set as compressor using --use-compress-program option.
3. The file name of the archive being created ends in '.xz' and
auto-compress option (-a) is used.
Xz is used for decompression if one of the following conditions is met:
1. The option --xz or -J is used.
2. The xz binary is set as compressor using --use-compress-program option.
3. The file is recognized as xz compressed stream data.
* Short option -J reassigned as a short equivalent of --xz
* New option -I
The -I option is assigned as a short equivalent for
--use-compress-program.
* The --no-recursive option works in incremental mode.
version 1.21 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2008-12-27
* New short option -J
A shortcut for --lzma.
* New option --lzop
* New option --no-auto-compress
Cancels the effect of previous --auto-compress (-a) option.
* New option --no-null
Cancels the effect of previous --null option.
* Compressed format recognition
If tar is unable to determine archive compression format, it falls
back to using archive suffix to determine it.
* VCS support.
Using --exclude-vcs handles also files used internally by Bazaar,
Mercurial and Darcs.
* Transformation scope flags
Name transformation expressions understand additional flags that
control type of archive members affected by them. The flags are:
- r
Apply transformation to regular archive members.
- s
Apply transformation to symbolic link targets.
- h
Apply transformation to hard link targets.
Corresponding upper-case letters negate the meaning, so that
'H' means "do not apply transformation to hard link targets".
The scope flags are listed in the third part of an 's' expression,
e.g.:
tar --transform 's|^|/usr/local/|S'
Default is 'rsh', which means that transformations are applied to
both regular archive members and to the targets of symbolic and hard
links. If several transform expressions are used, the default flags
can be changed using 'flags=' statement before the expressions, e.g.:
tar --transform 'flags=S;s|^|/usr/local/|S'
* Bugfixes
** The --null option disabled handling of tar options in list files. This
is fixed.
** Fixed record size autodetection. If the detected record size differs from
the expected value (either default one, or the one set from the
command line), tar always prints a warning if verbosity level is set
to 1 or greater, i.e. if either -t or -v option is given.
version 1.20 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2008-04-14
* New option --auto-compress (-a)
With --create, selects compression algorithm basing on the suffix
of the archive file name.
* New option --lzma
Selects LZMA compression algorithm
* New option --hard-dereference
During archive creation, dereferences hard links and stores the files
they refer to, instead of creating usual hard link members (type '1').
* New option --checkpoint-action
This action allows to specify an action to be executed upon hitting a
checkpoint. Recognized actions are: dot, echo (the default),
echo=string, ttyout=string, exec=cmdline, and sleep=value. Any number
of '--checkpoint-action' options can be specified, the actions will be
executed in order of their appearance in the command line. See
chapter 3.8 "Checkpoints" for a complete description.
* New options --no-check-device, --check-device.
The '--no-check-device' option disables comparing device numbers during
preparatory stage of an incremental dump. This allows to avoid
creating full dumps if the device numbers change (e.g. when using an
LVM snapshot).
The '--check-device' option enables comparing device numbers. This is
the default. This option is provided to undo the effect of the previous
'--no-check-device' option, e.g. if it was set in TAR_OPTIONS
environment variable.
* The --transform option.
Any number of '--transform' options can be given in the command line.
The specified transformations will be applied in turn.
The argument to '--transform' option can be a list of replace
expressions, separated by a semicolon (as in 'sed').
Filename transformations are applied to symbolic link targets
during both creation and extraction. Tar 1.19 used them only
during extraction.
For a detailed description, see chapter 6.7 "Modifying File and Member
Names".
* Info (end-of-volume) scripts
The value of the blocking factor is made available to info and
checkpoint scripts via environment variable TAR_BLOCKING_FACTOR.
* Incremental archives
Improved (sped up) extracting from incremental archives.
* Bugfixes.
** Fix bug introduced in version 1.19: tar refused to update non-existing
archives.
version 1.19 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2007-10-10
* New option --exclude-vcs
Excludes directories and files, created by several widely used version
control systems, e.g. "CVS/", ".svn/", etc.
* --exclude-tag and --exclude-cache options
The following options now work with incremental archives as well:
--exclude-caches
--exclude-caches-all
--exclude-tag
--exclude-tag-all
--exclude-tag-under
* Fix handling of renamed files in listed incremental archives.
Previous versions always stored absolute file names in rename
records, even if -P was not used. This is fixed: rename records
contain file names processed in accordance with the command line
settings.
* Fix --version output.
* Recognition of broken archives.
When supplied an archive smaller than 512 bytes in reading mode (-x,
-t), the previous version of tar silently ignored it, exiting with
code 0. It is fixed. Tar now issues the following diagnostic message:
'This does not look like a tar archive', and exits with code 2.
* Fix double-dot recognition in archive member names in case of duplicate '/.'.
* Fix file padding in case of truncation of the input file to zero size.
version 1.18 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2007-06-29
* Licensed under the GPLv3
* Fixed several bugs in the testsuite
version 1.17 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2007-06-08
* Fix archivation of sparse files in posix mode. Previous versions padded
sparse members with spurious zero blocks.
* Fix operation of --verify --listed-incremental. Version 1.16.1 produced
a full dump when both options were given.
* Fix --occurrence. In previous versions it continued scanning the archive
even though all requested members has already been extracted.
* Scope of --transform and --strip-components options.
In addition to affecting regular archive members, the --transform
option affects hard and soft link targets and the --strip-components
option affects hard link targets as well.
* End-of-volume script can send the new volume name to tar by writing
it to the file descriptor stored in the environment variable TAR_FD.
version 1.16.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-12-09
* New option --exclude-tag allows to specify "exclusion tag files", i.e.
files whose presence in a directory means that the directory should not
be archived.
* The --exclude-cache option excludes directories that contain the
CACHEDIR.TAG file from being archived. Previous versions excluded
directory contents only, while the directories themselves were
still added to the archive.
* Support for reading ustar type 'N' header logical records has been removed.
This GNU extension was generated only by very old versions of GNU 'tar'.
Unfortunately its implementation had security holes; see
<http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2006-11/0344.html>.
We don't expect that any tar archives in practical use have type 'N'
records, but if you have one and you trust its contents, you can
decode it with GNU tar 1.16 or earlier.
* Race conditions have been fixed that in some cases briefly allowed
files extracted by 'tar -x --same-owner' (or plain 'tar -x', when
running as root) to be accessed by users that they shouldn't have been.
version 1.16 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-10-21
* After creating an archive, tar exits with code 1 if some files were
changed while being read. Previous versions exited with code 2 (fatal
error), and only if some files were truncated while being archived.
* New option --mtime allows to set modification times for all archive
members during creation.
* Bug fixes
** Avoid running off file descriptors when using multiple -C options.
** tar --index-file=FILE --file=- sent the archive to FILE, and
the listing to stderr.
version 1.15.91 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-06-16
* Incompatible changes
** Globbing
Previous versions of GNU tar assumed shell-style globbing when
extracting from or listing an archive. For example:
tar xf foo.tar '*.c'
would extract all files whose names end in '.c'. This behavior
was not documented and was incompatible with traditional tar
implementations. Therefore, starting from this version, GNU tar
no longer uses globbing by default. For example, the above invocation
is now interpreted as a request to extract from the archive the file
named '*.c'.
To treat member names as globbing patterns, use --wildcards option.
If you wish tar to mimic the behavior of versions up to 1.15.90,
add --wildcards to the value of the environment variable TAR_OPTIONS.
The exact way in which tar interprets member names is controlled by the
following command line options:
--wildcards use wildcards
--anchored patterns match file name start
--ignore-case ignore case
--wildcards-match-slash wildcards match '/'
Each of these options has a '--no-' counterpart that disables its
effect (e.g. --no-wildcards).
These options affect both the interpretation of member names from
command line and that of the exclusion patterns (given with --exclude
and --exclude-from options). The defaults are:
1. For member names: --no-wildcards --anchored
2. For exclusion patterns: --wildcards --no-anchored --wildcards-match-slash
The options can appear multiple times in the command line, thereby
changing the way command line arguments are interpreted. For example,
to use case-insensitive matching in exclude patterns and to revert to
case-sensitive matching for the rest of command line, one could write:
tar xf foo.tar --ignore-case --exclude-from=FILE --no-ignore-case file.name
** Short option -l is now an alias of --check-links option, which complies
with UNIX98. This ends the transition period started with version 1.14.
* New features
** New option --transform allows to transform file names before storing them
in the archive or member names before extracting. The option takes a
sed replace expression as its argument. For example,
tar cf foo.tar --transform 's,^,prefix/,'
will add 'prefix/' to all file names stored in foo.tar.
** --strip-components option works when deleting and comparing. In previous
versions it worked only with --extract.
** New option --show-transformed-names enables display of transformed file
or archive. It generalizes --show-stored-names option, introduced in
1.15.90. In particular, when creating an archive in verbose mode, it lists
member names as stored in the archive, i.e., with any eventual prefixes
removed and file name transformations applied. The option is useful,
for example, while comparing 'tar cv' and 'tar tv' outputs.
** New incremental snapshot file format keeps information about file names
as well as that about directories.
** The --checkpoint option takes an optional argument specifying the number
of records between the two successive checkpoints. Optional dot
starting the argument intructs tar to print dots instead of textual
checkpoints.
** The --totals option can be used with any tar operation (previous versions
understood it only with --create). If an argument to this option is
given, it specifies the signal upon delivery of which the statistics
is to be printed. Both forms of this option (with and without
argument) can be given to in a single invocation of tar.
* Bug fixes
** Detect attempts to update compressed archives.