GNU tar NEWS - User visible changes.
-Copyright (C) 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004
+Copyright (C) 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003,
+2004, 2005
Free Software Foundation, Inc.
See the end for copying conditions.
Please send GNU tar bug reports to <bug-tar@gnu.org>
\f
+version 1.15.2 (CVS version -- unreleased)
+
+* New features
+
+* Any number of -T (--files-from) options may be used in 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 option name within the file list file. Now any file whose name
+starts with - is handled as option. To insert file names starting with
+dash, use --add-file option.
+
+* List files containing null-separated file names are detected and processed
+automatically. It is not necessary to give --null option.
+
+* New option --no-unquote disables unquoting input file names. This
+is useful e.g. for processing output from `find dir -print0'.
+An orthogonal option --unquote is provided as well.
+
+* 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.
+
+* Bugfixes
+
+** 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) hanged when trying to compare file contents.
-version 1.13.94 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-04-04
+\f
+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.
+
+\f
+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 supercedes 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).
+
+* Bugfixes:
+** 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.
+
+\f
+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
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
+* 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
* --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
* 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.
+\f
version 1.13.25 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-26
* Bug fixes.
+\f
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.
+\f
version 1.13.23 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-13
* Bug, porting, and copyright notice fixes.
+\f
version 1.13.22 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-29
* Bug fixes.
+\f
version 1.13.21 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-28
* Porting and copyright notice fixes.
+\f
version 1.13.20 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-27
* Some bugs were fixed:
The translation for Korean has been withdrawn due to encoding errors.
It will be reissued once those are fixed.
+\f
version 1.13.19 - Paul Eggert, 2001-01-13
* The -I option has been withdrawn, as it was buggy and confusing.
* 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.
+\f
version 1.13.18 - Paul Eggert, 2000-10-29
* Some security problems have been fixed. `tar -x' now modifies only
* 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.
+\f
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.
+\f
version 1.13.16 - Paul Eggert, 1999-12-13.
* By default, tar now refuses to overwrite an existing file when
* tar now ignores socket files when creating an archive.
Previously tar archived sockets as fifos, which caused problems.
+\f
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.
+\f
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.
+\f
version 1.13.13 - Paul Eggert, 1999-10-11.
* Invalid headers in tar files now elicit errors, not just warnings.
* If you specify an invalid date, `tar' now substitutes (time_t) -1.
* `configure --with-dmalloc' is no longer available.
+\f
version 1.13.12 - Paul Eggert, 1999-09-24.
* `tar' now supports hard links to symbolic links.
* Some diagnostics have been reworded for consistency.
-
+\f
version 1.13.11 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-23.
* The short name of the --bzip option has been changed to -I,
numeric UTC offsets like `-0500' instead of abbreviations like
`EST', as abbreviations are not standardized and are ambiguous.
-
+\f
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.]
-
+\f
version 1.13.9 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-18.
* `tar' now writes two zero blocks at end-of-archive instead of just one.
* `tar' now reads buggy tar files that have a null byte at the start of a
numeric header field.
-
+\f
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.
-
+\f
version 1.13.7 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-14.
* --listed-incremental and --newer are now incompatible options.
* --diff without --absolute-names no longer falls back on absolute names.
-
+\f
version 1.13.6 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-11.
* An --exclude pattern containing / now excludes a file only if it matches an
* New option -y or --bzip2 for bzip2 compression, by popular request.
-
+\f
version 1.13.5 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-20.
* Do the delayed updates of file metadata even after a fatal error.
-
+\f
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.
-
+\f
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.
-
+\f
version 1.13.2 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-14.
* Bug reporting address changed to <bug-tar@gnu.org>.
-
+\f
version 1.13.1 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-12.
* Bug fixes only.
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., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330,
-Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
+the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
+Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
\f
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