-GNU tar NEWS - User visible changes. 2010-03-28
+GNU tar NEWS - User visible changes. 2011-11-26
Please send GNU tar bug reports to <bug-tar@gnu.org>
\f
+version 1.26.90 (Git)
+
+* New features
+
+** --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.
+
+\f
+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.
+
+\f
+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'.
+
+\f
+version 1.24 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2010-10-24
* The --full-time option.
* 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
** --remove-files
-Tar --remove-files failed to remove a directory which contained
+`Tar --remove-files' failed to remove a directory which contained
symlinks to another files within that directory.
** --test-label behavior
tar -rf archive --label 'My volume' .
-This did not work in previous versions, in spite of what the docs said.
+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.
* 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
+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
* Support for xz compression
-Tar uses xz for compression if one of the following conditions is met:
+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:
+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.
- s
Apply transformation to symbolic link targets.
- - h
+ - h
Apply transformation to hard link targets.
Corresponding upper-case letters negate the meaning, so that
during extraction.
For a detailed description, see chapter 6.7 "Modifying File and Member
-Names".
+Names".
* Info (end-of-volume) scripts
The following options now work with incremental archives as well:
- --exclude-caches
- --exclude-caches-all
+ --exclude-caches
+ --exclude-caches-all
--exclude-tag
--exclude-tag-all
--exclude-tag-under
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.
* 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.
+ The code 'no' for Norwegian (Bokmål) has been withdrawn; use 'nb' instead.
* Bug fixes.
but they have been removed to maintain compatibility with paxutils.
Please try --use=bzip2 instead of --bzip2.
\f
-Version 1.12 - François Pinard, 1997-04.
+Version 1.12 - François Pinard, 1997-04.
Sensitive matters
* Use shell globbing patterns for --label, instead of regular expressions.
Many bugs are squashed, while others still run free.
\f
-Version 1.11.8 - François Pinard, 1995-06.
+Version 1.11.8 - François Pinard, 1995-06.
* Messages available in French, German, Portuguese and Swedish.
* The distribution provides a rudimentary Texinfo manual.