GNU tar NEWS - User visible changes.
Copyright 1994, 1995-1998, 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+version 1.13.16 - Paul Eggert, 1999-12-13.
+
+* By default, tar now refuses to overwrite existing files when
+ extracting files from an archive; instead, it removes them before
+ extracting. 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 multibytes.
+
+* 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.