Version 1.34 of GNU tar is available for download (see the download directory for archives in other formats). This version fixes the following bugs:
Version 1.33 of GNU tar is available for download. Summary of changes in this version:
GNU tar version 1.32 is available for download.
New in this release:
See http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-tar/2019-01/msg00015.html,
for details
Version 1.31 is available for download. New in this release:
Version 1.30 of GNU tar is available for download. See the NEWS file, for a list of important changes in this release.
GNU tar version 1.29 is available for download.
New in this release:
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 cancelled by the --no-verbatim-files-from option.
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.
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.
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 ReproducibleBuilds, for more information.
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:
Use lseek(2) SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE whence parameters.
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.
GNU tar version 1.28 is available for download.
New in this release:
The --checkpoint-action=totals option instructs tar to output the total number of bytes transferred at each checkpoint.
New conversion specifiers are implemented. Some of them take optional arguments, supplied in curly braces between the percent
sign and the specifier letter.
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.
The --sort=*_ORDER_ option instructs tar to sort directory entries according to ORDER. It takes effect when creating archives. Available _ORDER_s 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.
Before dumping a directory check if it contains FILE, and if so read exclude patterns for this directory from it.
Same as above, but the exclusion patterns read from FILE remain in effect for any subdirectory, recursively.
Read exclude tags from VCS ignore files, where such files exist. Supported VCS's are: CVS, Git, Bazaar, Mercurial.
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.
Tar 1.27.1 is available for download. This release fixes some bugs found so far in version 1.27, namely:
Tar 1.27 was made available for download on 2013-10-05. For information about what's new in this release, please see the NEWS file.
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/tar.git/plain/NEWS?id=release_1_27
Tar 1.26 is available for download. Changes in this release:
Tar 1.25 is available for download. This is mainly a bug-fix release addressing the bugs found in the previous version 1.24:
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:
For example, if compress is not available, tar will try gzip.
GNU tar 1.24 is available for download. Main changes in this release:
See the NEWS file for a detailed list of changes.
GNU tar 1.23 is available for download. Main changes in this release:
Tar's repository has migrated from CVS to GIT. See http://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=tar for additional information.
GNU tar 1.22 is available for download. Main changes in this release:
GNU tar 1.21 is available for download from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/tar.
New in this version:
Cancels the effect of previous --auto-compress (-a) option.
Cancels the effect of previous --null option.
If tar is unable to determine archive compression format, it falls back to using archive suffix to determine it.
Using --exclude-vcs handles also files used internally by Bazaar,
Mercurial and Darcs.
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 flag 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'
- The --null option disabled handling of tar options in list files. This
is fixed.
- Fixed record size autodetection. If detected record size differs from the expected value (either default, or set on 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.
GNU tar 1.20 is available for download from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/tar.
New in this version:
With --create, selects compression algorithm basing on the suffix of the archive file name.
Selects LZMA compression algorithm
During archive creation, dereferences hard links and stores the files they refer to, instead of creating usual hard link members (type '1').
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 documentation, section 3.8 "Checkpoints" for a complete description.
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.
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 documentation, section 6.7 "Modifying File and Member Names".
The value of the blocking factor is made available to info and
checkpoint scripts via environment variable TAR_BLOCKING_FACTOR.
Improved (sped up) extracting from incremental archives.
GNU tar 1.18 was released today as a part of the release of the GNU General Public License version 3. Starting from this release, the package is licensed under the GPLv3.
GNU tar 1.17 is available from ftp.gnu.org and its mirrors worldwide. New in this release:
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.
GNU tar 1.16.1 is available from ftp.gnu.org and its mirrors worldwide. It is the first maintenance release in the 1.16 series. The list of noteworthy changes follows:
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.