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GNU tar NEWS - User visible changes. 2012-11-19 Please send GNU tar bug reports to <bug-tar@gnu.org> ** 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. * New command line option --keep-directory-symlink By default, if when 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. * 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.  version 1.26 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2011-03-12 * Bug fixes ** 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. * 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.  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-opion='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-opion='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.  version 1.15.90 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-02-19 * New features ** Any number of -T (--files-from) options may be used in the command line. The file specified with -T may include any valid `tar' options, including another -T option. Compatibility note: older versions of tar would only recognize -C as an option name within the file list file. Now any file whose name starts with - is handled as an option. To insert file names starting with dash, use the --add-file option. ** List files containing null-separated file names are detected and processed automatically. It is no longer necessary to give the --null option. ** New option --no-unquote disables the unquoting of input file names. This is useful for processing output from `find dir -print0'. An orthogonal option --unquote is provided as well. ** New option --test-label tests the archive volume label. If an argument is specified, the label is compared against its value. Tar exits with code 0 if the two strings match, and with code 2 if they do not. If no argument is given, the --verbose option is implied. In this case, tar prints the label name if present and exits with code 0. ** New option --show-stored-names. When creating an archive in verbose mode, it lists member names as stored in the archive, i.e., with any eventual prefixes removed. The option is useful, for example, while comparing `tar cv' and `tar tv' outputs. ** New option --to-command pipes the contents of archive members to the specified command. ** New option --atime-preserve=system, which uses the O_NOATIME feature of recent Linux kernels to avoid some problems when preserving file access times. ** New option --delay-directory-restore delays restoring modification times and permissions of extracted directories until the end of extraction. This is necessary for restoring from archives with unusual member ordering (in particular, those created with --no-recursion option). This option is implied when restoring from incremental archives. ** New option --restrict prohibits use of some potentially harmful tar options. Currently it disables '!' escape in multi-volume name menu. ** New options --quoting-style and --quote-chars control the way tar quotes member names on output. The --quoting-style takes an argument specifying the quoting style to use (literal, shell, shell-always, c, escape, locale, clocale). The argument to --quote-chars is a string specifying characters to quote, even if the selected quoting style would not quote them otherwise. The option --no-quote-chars is provided to disable quoting certain characters. ** The end-of-volume script (introduced with --info-script option) can get current archive name from the environment variable TAR_ARCHIVE and the volume number from the variable TAR_VOLUME. It can alter the archive name by writing new name to the file descriptor 3. ** Better support for full-resolution time stamps. Tar cannot restore time stamps to full nanosecond resolution, though, until the kernel guys get their act together and give us a system call to set file time stamps to nanosecond resolution. ** The -v option now prints time stamps only to 1-minute resolution, not full resolution, to avoid using up too many output columns. Nanosecond resolution is now supported, but that would be too much. * Bug fixes ** Allow non-option arguments to be interspersed with options. ** When extracting or listing archives in old GNU format, tar used to read an extra block of data after a long name header if length of the member name was divisible by block size (512). Consequently, the file pointer was set off and the next member was not processed correctly. ** Previous version created invalid archives when files shrink during reading. ** Compare mode (tar d) hung when trying to compare file contents. ** Previous versions in certain cases failed to restore directory modification times. ** When creating an archive, do not attempt to store files whose meta-data cannot be stored in the header due to format limitations (for ustar and v7 formats). ** The --version option now also outputs information about copyright, license, and credits. This reverts to the behavior of tar 1.14 and earlier, and conforms to the GNU coding standards. The --license (-L) option introduced in tar 1.15 has been removed, since it's no longer needed.  version 1.15.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-12-21 This version fixes a bug introduced in 1.15 which caused tar to refuse to extract files from standard input.  version 1.15 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-12-20 * Compressed archives are recognised automatically, it is no longer necessary to specify -Z, -z, or -j options to read them. Thus, you can now run `tar tf archive.tar.gz'. * When restoring incremental dumps, --one-file-system option prevents directory hierarchies residing on different devices from being purged. With the previous versions of tar it was dangerous to create incremental dumps with --one-file-system option, since they would recursively remove mount points when restoring from the back up. This change fixes the bug. * Renamed --strip-path to --strip-components for consistency with the GNU convention. * Skipping archive members is sped up if the archive media supports seeks. * Restore script starts restoring only if it is given --all (-a) option, or some patterns. This is to prevent accidental restores. * `tar --verify' prints a warning if during archive creation some of the file names had their prefixes stripped off. * New option --exclude-caches instructs tar to exclude cache directories automatically on archive creation. Cache directories are those containing a standardized tag file, as specified at: http://www.brynosaurus.com/cachedir/spec.html * New configure option --with-rmt allows to specify full path name to the `rmt' utility. This supersedes DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND variable introduced in version 1.14 * New configure variable DEFAULT_RMT_DIR allows to specify the directory where to install `rmt' utility. This is necessary since modifying --libexecdir as was suggested for version 1.14 produced a side effect: it also modified installation prefix for backup scripts (if --enable-backup-scripts was given). * Bug fixes: ** Fixed flow in recognizing files to be included in incremental dumps. ** Correctly recognize sparse archive members when used with -T option. ** GNU multivolume headers cannot store filenames longer than 100 characters. Do not allow multivolume archives to begin with such filenames. ** If a member with link count > 2 was stored in the archive twice, previous versions of tar were not able to extract it, since they were trying to link the file to itself, which always failed and lead to removing the already extracted copy. Preserve the first extracted copy in such cases. ** Restore script was passing improper argument to tar --listed option (which didn't affect the functionality, but was logically incorrect). ** Fixed verification of created archives. ** Fixed unquoting of file names containing backslash escapes (previous versions failed to recognize \a and \v). ** When attempting to delete a non-existing member from the archive, previous versions of tar used to overwrite last archive block with zeroes.  version 1.14 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-05-11 * Added support for POSIX.1-2001 and ustar archive formats. * New option --format allows to select the output archive format * The default output format can be selected at configuration time by presetting the environment variable DEFAULT_ARCHIVE_FORMAT. Allowed values are GNU, V7, OLDGNU and POSIX. * New option --strip-path allows to cut off a given number of path elements from the name of the file being extracted. * New options --index-file, --no-overwrite-dir. The --overwrite-dir option is now the default; use --no-overwrite-dir if you prefer the previous default behavior. * The semantics of -o option is changed. When extracting, it does the same as --no-same-owner GNU tar option. This is compatible with UNIX98 tar. Otherwise, its effect is the same as that of --old-archive option. This latter is deprecated and will be removed in future. * New option --check-links prints a message if not all links are dumped for a file being archived. This corresponds to the UNIX98 -l option. The current semantics of the -l option is retained for compatibility with previous releases, however such usage is strongly deprecated as the option will change to its UNIX98 semantics in the future releases. * New option --occurrence[=N] can be used in conjunction with one of the subcommands --delete, --diff, --extract or --list when a list of files is given either on the command line or via -T option. This option instructs tar to process only the Nth occurrence of each named file. N defaults to 1, so `tar -x -f archive --occurrence filename' extracts the first occurrence of `filename' from `archive' and terminates without scanning to the end of the archive. * New option --pax-option allows to control the handling of POSIX keywords in `pax' extended headers. It is equivalent to `pax' -o option. * --incremental and --listed-incremental options work correctly on individual files, as well as on directories. * New scripts: backup (replaces old level-0 and level-1) and restore. The scripts are compiled and installed if --enable-backup-scripts option is given to configure. * By default tar searches "rmt" utility in "$prefix/libexec/rmt", which is consistent with the location where the version of "rmt" included in the package is installed. Previous versions of tar used "/etc/rmt". To install "rmt" to its traditional location, run configure with option --libexecdir=/etc. Otherwise, if you already have rmt installed and wish to use it, instead of the shipped in version, set the variable DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND to the full path name of the utility, e.g., ./configure DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND=/etc/rmt. Notice also that the full path name of the "rmt" utility to use can be set at runtime, by giving option --rmt-command to tar. * Removed obsolete command line options: ** --absolute-paths superseded by --absolute-names ** --block-compress is not needed any longer ** --block-size superseded by --blocking-factor ** --modification-time superseded by --touch ** --read-full-blocks superseded by --read-full-records ** --record-number superseded by --block-number ** --version-control superseded by --backup * New message translations fi (Finnish), gl (Galician), hr (Croatian), hu (Hungarian), ms (Malaysian), nb (Norwegian), ro (Romanian), sk (Slovak), zh_CN (Chinese simplified), zh_TW (Chinese traditional). The code 'no' for Norwegian (Bokmål) has been withdrawn; use 'nb' instead. * Bug fixes.  version 1.13.25 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-26 * Bug fixes.  version 1.13.24 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-22 * New option --overwrite-dir. * Fixes for buffer overrun, porting, and copyright notice problems. * The message translations for Korean are available again.  version 1.13.23 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-13 * Bug, porting, and copyright notice fixes.  version 1.13.22 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-29 * Bug fixes.  version 1.13.21 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-28 * Porting and copyright notice fixes.  version 1.13.20 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-27 * Some bugs were fixed: - security problems - hard links to symbolic links * New option --recursion (the default) that is the inverse of --no-recursion. * New options --anchored, --ignore-case, --wildcards, --wildcards-match-slash, and their negations (e.g., --no-anchored). Along with --recursion and --no-recursion, these options control how exclude patterns are interpreted. * The default interpretation of exclude patterns is now --no-anchored --no-ignore-case --recursion --wildcards --wildcards-match-slash. This is a quiet change to the semantics of --exclude. The previous semantics were a failed attempt at backward compatibility but it became clear that the semantics were puzzling and did not satisfy everybody. Rather than continue to try to revive that dead horse we thought it better to substitute cleaner semantics, with options so that you can change the behavior more to your liking. * New message translations for Indonesian and Turkish. The translation for Korean has been withdrawn due to encoding errors. It will be reissued once those are fixed.  version 1.13.19 - Paul Eggert, 2001-01-13 * The -I option has been withdrawn, as it was buggy and confusing. Eventually it is planned to be reintroduced, with the same meaning as -T. * With an option like -N DATE, if DATE starts with "/" or ".", it is taken to be a file name; the last-modified time of that file is used as the date.  version 1.13.18 - Paul Eggert, 2000-10-29 * Some security problems have been fixed. `tar -x' now modifies only files under the working directory, unless you also specify an unsafe option like --absolute-names or --overwrite. * The short name of the --bzip option has been changed to -j, and -I is now an alias for -T, for compatibility with Solaris tar. * The manual is now distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License. * The new environment variable TAR_OPTIONS holds default command-line options. * The --no-recursion option now affects extraction too. * The wording in some diagnostics has been changed slightly. * Snapshot files now record whether each file was accessed via NFS. The new file format is upward- and downward-compatible with the old. * New language supported: da. * Compilation by traditional (K&R) C compilers is no longer supported. If you still use such a compiler, please use GCC instead. * This version of tar works best with GNU gzip test version 1.3 or later. Please see <ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gzip/>. * `tar --delete -f -' now works again.  version 1.13.17 - Paul Eggert, 2000-01-07. * `tar --delete -f -' is no longer allowed; it was too buggy. * Diagnostic messages have been made more regular and consistent.  version 1.13.16 - Paul Eggert, 1999-12-13. * By default, tar now refuses to overwrite an existing file when extracting files from an archive; instead, it removes the file before extracting it. If the existing file is a symbolic link, the link is removed and not the pointed-to file. There is one exception: existing nonempty directories are not removed, nor are their ownerships or permissions extracted. This fixes some longstanding security problems. The new --overwrite option enables the old default behavior. For regular files, tar implements this change by using the O_EXCL option of `open' to ensure that it creates the file; if this fails, it removes the file and tries again. This is similar to the behavior of the --unlink-first option, but it is faster in the common case of extracting a new directory. * By default, tar now ignores file names containing a component of `..' when extracting, and warns about such file names when creating an archive. To enable the old behavior, use the -P or --absolute-names option. * Tar now handles file names with multibyte encodings (e.g., UTF-8, Shift-JIS) correctly. It relies on the mbrtowc function to handle multibyte characters. * The file generated by -g or --listed-incremental now uses a format that is independent of locale, so that users need not worry about locale when restoring a backup. This is needed for proper support of multibyte characters. Old-format files can still be read, and older versions of GNU tar can read new-format files, unless member names have multibyte chars. * Many diagnostics have been changed slightly, so that file names are now output unambiguously. File names in diagnostics now are either `quoted like this' (in the default C locale) or are followed by colon, newline, or space, depending on context. Unprintable characters are escaped with a C-like backslash conventions. Terminating characters (e.g., close-quote, colon, newline) are also escaped as needed. * tar now ignores socket files when creating an archive. Previously tar archived sockets as fifos, which caused problems.  version 1.13.15 - Paul Eggert, 1999-12-03. * If a file's ctime changes when being archived, report an error. Previously tar looked at mtime, which missed some errors.  version 1.13.14 - Paul Eggert, 1999-11-07. * New translations ja, pt_BR. * New options --help and --version for rmt. * Ignore Solaris door files when creating an archive.  version 1.13.13 - Paul Eggert, 1999-10-11. * Invalid headers in tar files now elicit errors, not just warnings. * `tar --version' output conforms to the latest GNU coding standards. * If you specify an invalid date, `tar' now substitutes (time_t) -1. * `configure --with-dmalloc' is no longer available.  version 1.13.12 - Paul Eggert, 1999-09-24. * `tar' now supports hard links to symbolic links. * New options --no-same-owner, --no-same-permissions. * --total now also outputs a human-readable size, and a throughput value. * `tar' now uses two's-complement base-256 when outputting header values that are out of the range of the standard unsigned base-8 format. This affects archive members with negative or huge time stamps or uids, and archive members 8 GB or larger. The new tar archives cannot be read by traditional tar, or by older versions of GNU tar. Use the --old-archive option to revert to the old behavior, which uses unportable representations for negative values, and which rejects large files. * On 32-bit hosts, `tar' now assumes that an incoming time stamp T in the range 2**31 <= T < 2**32 represents the negative time (T - 2**32). This behavior is nonstandard and is not portable to 64-bit time_t hosts, so `tar' issues a warning. * `tar' no longer gives up extracting immediately upon discovering that an archive contains garbage at the end. It attempts to extract as many files as possible from the good data before the garbage. * A read error now causes a nonzero exit status, not just a warning. * Some diagnostics have been reworded for consistency.  version 1.13.11 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-23. * The short name of the --bzip option has been changed to -I, for compatibility with paxutils. * -T /dev/null now matches nothing; previously, it matched anything if no explicit operands were given. * The `--' option now works the same as with other GNU utilities; it causes later operands to be interpreted as file names, not options, even if they begin with `-'. * For the --newer and --after-date options, the table of time zone abbreviations like `EST' has been updated to match current practice. Also, local time abbreviations are now recognized, even if they are not in tar's hardwired table. Remember, though, that you should use numeric UTC offsets like `-0500' instead of abbreviations like `EST', as abbreviations are not standardized and are ambiguous.  version 1.13.10 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-20. * `tar' now uses signed base-64 when outputting header values that are out of the range of the standard unsigned base-8 format. [This change was superseded in 1.13.12, described above.]  version 1.13.9 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-18. * `tar' now writes two zero blocks at end-of-archive instead of just one. POSIX.1 requires this, and some other `tar' implementations check for it. * `tar' no longer silently accepts a block containing nonzero checksum bytes as a zero block. * `tar' now reads buggy tar files that have a null byte at the start of a numeric header field.  version 1.13.8 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-16. * For compatibility with traditional `tar', intermediate directories created automatically by root are no longer given the uid and gid of the original file or directory.  version 1.13.7 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-14. * --listed-incremental and --newer are now incompatible options. * When creating an archive, leading `./' is no longer stripped, to match traditional tar's behavior (and simplify the documentation). * --diff without --absolute-names no longer falls back on absolute names.  version 1.13.6 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-11. * An --exclude pattern containing / now excludes a file only if it matches an initial prefix of the file name; a pattern without / continues to exclude a file if it matches any file name component. * The protocol for talking to rmt has been extended slightly. Open flags are now communicated in symbolic format as well as numeric. The symbolic format (e.g., "O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC") is for portability when rmt is operating on a different operating system from tar. The numeric format is retained, and rmt uses it if symbolic format is absent, for backward compatibility with older versions of tar and rmt. * When writing GNU tar format headers, tar now uses signed base-64 for values that cannot be represented in unsigned octal. This supports larger files (2**66 - 1 bytes instead of 2**33 - 1 bytes), larger uids, negative time stamps, etc. * When extracting files with unknown ownership, tar now looks up the uid and gid "nobody" on hosts whose headers do not define UID_NOBODY and GID_NOBODY, and falls back on uid/gid -2 if there is no "nobody". * tar -t --numeric-owner now prints numeric uids and gids, not symbolic. * New option -y or --bzip2 for bzip2 compression, by popular request.  version 1.13.5 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-20. * Do the delayed updates of file metadata even after a fatal error.  version 1.13.4 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-20. * Do not chmod unless we are root or the -p option was given; this matches historical practice.  version 1.13.3 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-16. * A path name is excluded if any of its file name components matches an excluded pattern, even if the path name was specified on the command line. Also see 1.13.6 for later changes in this area.  version 1.13.2 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-14. * Bug reporting address changed to <bug-tar@gnu.org>.  version 1.13.1 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-12. * Bug fixes only.  version 1.13 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-08. * Support for large files, e.g., files larger than 2 GB on many 32-bit hosts. Also, support for larger uids, device ids, etc. * Many bug fixes and porting fixes. * This release is only for fixes. A more ambitious test release, with new features, is available as part of the paxutils. Please see: ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/paxutils/ The fixes in this release are intended to be merged with paxutils at some point, but they haven't been merged yet. * An interim GNU tar alpha had new --bzip2 and --ending-file options, but they have been removed to maintain compatibility with paxutils. Please try --use=bzip2 instead of --bzip2.  Version 1.12 - François Pinard, 1997-04. Sensitive matters * Use shell globbing patterns for --label, instead of regular expressions. * Do not quote anymore internally over the quoting done by the shell. Output for humans * Offer internationalization capabilities of most recent GNU gettext. * Messages available in many more languages, thanks to all translators! * Usage of ISO 8601 dates in listings, instead of local American dates. * More normalization and cleanup in error messages. Creation * For helping using tar with find, offer a --no-recursion option. * Implement --numeric-owner for ignoring symbolic names at create time. * New --owner, --group --mode options, still preliminary. * Recognize creating an archive on /dev/null, so Amanda works faster. * Object to the creation of an empty archive (like in `tar cf FILE'). * Barely start implementing --posix and POSIXLY_CORRECT. Extraction * Make a better job at restoring file and directory attributes. * Automatically attempt deleting existing files when in the way. * Option --unlink-first (-U) removes most files prior to extraction. * Option --recursive-unlink removes non-empty directories when in the way. * Option --numeric-owner ignores owner/group names, it uses UID/GID instead. * Use global umask when creating missing intermediate directories. * When symlinks are not available, extract symbolic links as hard links. * Diagnose extraction of contiguous files as regular files. * New --backup, --suffix and --version-control options. Various changes * Better support of huge archives with --tape-length and --totals. * Rename option --read-full-blocks (-B) to --read-full-records (-B). * Rename option --block-size (-b) to --blocking-factor (-b). * Rename option --record-number (-R) to --block-number (-R). * With --block-number (-R), report null blocks and end of file. * Implement --record-size for introducing a size in bytes. * Delete --block-compress option and rather decide it automatically. * Rename option --modification-time to --touch. Many bugs are squashed, while others still run free.  Version 1.11.8 - François Pinard, 1995-06. * Messages available in French, German, Portuguese and Swedish. * The distribution provides a rudimentary Texinfo manual. * The device defaults to stdin/stdout, unless overridden by the installer. * Option --sparse (-S) should work on more systems. * Option --rsh-command may select an alternative remote shell program. Most changes are internal, and should yield better portability.  Version 1.11.2 - Michael Bushnell, 1993-03. * Changes in backup scripts: cleaned up considerably; notices error conditions better over rsh; DUMP_REMIND_SCRIPT is now an option in backup-specs; new file dump-remind is an example of a DUMP_REMIND_SCRIPT. * Superfluous "Reading dirname" was a bug; fixed. * Incompatibility problems with a bug on Solaris are fixed. * New option --gzip (aliases are --ungzip and -z); calls gzip instead of compress. Also, --use-compress-program lets you specify any compress program. --compress-block is renamed --block-compress and now requires one of the three compression options to be specified. * Several error messages are cleaned up. * Directory owners are now set properly when running as root. * Provide DUMP_REMIND_SCRIPT in backup-specs as a possible option for --info-script. * Behave better with broken rmt servers. * Dump scripts no longer use --atime-preserve; this causes a nasty probem. * Several Makefile cleanups.  Version 1.11.1 - Michael Bushnell, 1992-09. * Many bug fixes.  Version 1.11 - Michael Bushnell, 1992-09. Version 1.10.16 - 1992-07. Version 1.10.15 - 1992-06. Version 1.10.14 - 1992-05. Version 1.10.13 - 1992-01. * Many bug fixes. * Now uses GNU standard configure, generated by Autoconf. * Long options now use `--'; use of `+' is deprecated and support for it will eventually be removed. * New option --null causes filenames read by -T to be null-terminated, and causes -C to be ignored. * New option --remove-files deletes files (but not directories) after they are added to the archive. * New option --ignore-failed-read prevents read-errors from affecting the exit status. * New option --checkpoint prints occasional messages as the tape is being read or written. * New option --show-omitted-dirs prints the names of directories omitted from the archive. * Some tape drives which use a non-standard method of indicating end-of-tape now work correctly with multi-tape archives. * --volno-file: Read the volume number used in prompting the user (but not in recording volume ID's on the archive) from a file. * When using --multi-volume, you can now give multiple -f arguments; the various tape drives will get used in sequence and then wrap around to the beginning. * Remote archive names no longer have to be in /dev: any file with a `:' is interpreted as remote. If new option --force-local is given, then even archive files with a `:' are considered local. * New option --atime-preserve restores (if possible) atimes to their original values after dumping the file. * No longer does tar confusingly dump "." when you don't tell it what to dump. * When extracting directories, tar now correctly restores their modification and access times. * Longnames support is redone differently--long name info directly precedes the long-named file or link in the archive, so you no longer have to wait for the extract to hit the end of the tape for long names to work.  Version 1.10 - Michael Bushnell, 1991-07. * Filename to -G is optional. -C works right. Names +newer and +newer-mtime work right. * -g is now +incremental, -G is now +listed-incremental. * Sparse files now work correctly. * +volume is now called +label. * +exclude now takes a filename argument, and +exclude-from does what +exclude used to do. * Exit status is now correct. * +totals keeps track of total I/O and prints it when tar exits. * When using +label with +extract, the label is now a regexp. * New option +tape-length (-L) does multi-volume handling like BSD dump: you tell tar how big the tape is and it will prompt at that point instead of waiting for a write error. * New backup scripts level-0 and level-1 which might be useful to people. They use a file "backup-specs" for information, and shouldn't need local modification. These are what we use to do all our backups at the FSF.  Version 1.09 - Jay Fenlason, 1990-10. Version 1.08 - Jay Fenlason, 1990-01. Versions 1.07 back to 1.00 by Jay Fenlason. * See ChangeLog for more details.  Copyright (C) 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This file is part of GNU tar. GNU tar is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option) any later version. GNU tar is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with tar; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.  Local variables: mode: outline paragraph-separate: "[ ]*$" eval: (add-hook 'write-file-hooks 'time-stamp) time-stamp-start: "changes. " time-stamp-format: "%:y-%02m-%02d" time-stamp-end: "\n" end: