1 GNU tar NEWS - User visible changes.
2 Please send GNU tar bug reports to <bug-tar@gnu.org>
4 version 1.15.91 - Sergey Poznyakoff, (CVS version)
8 ** New incremental snapshot file format keeps information about file names
9 as well as that about directories.
13 version 1.15.90 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2006-02-19
17 ** Any number of -T (--files-from) options may be used in the command line.
18 The file specified with -T may include any valid `tar' options,
19 including another -T option.
20 Compatibility note: older versions of tar would only recognize -C
21 as an option name within the file list file. Now any file whose name
22 starts with - is handled as an option. To insert file names starting with
23 dash, use the --add-file option.
25 ** List files containing null-separated file names are detected and processed
26 automatically. It is no longer necessary to give the --null option.
28 ** New option --no-unquote disables the unquoting of input file names.
29 This is useful for processing output from `find dir -print0'.
30 An orthogonal option --unquote is provided as well.
32 ** New option --test-label tests the archive volume label.
33 If an argument is specified, the label is compared against its value.
34 Tar exits with code 0 if the two strings match, and with code 2 if
37 If no argument is given, the --verbose option is implied. In this case,
38 tar prints the label name if present and exits with code 0.
40 ** New option --show-stored-names. When creating an archive in verbose mode,
41 it lists member names as stored in the archive, i.e., with any eventual
42 prefixes removed. The option is useful, for example, while comparing
43 `tar cv' and `tar tv' outputs.
45 ** New option --to-command pipes the contents of archive members to the
48 ** New option --atime-preserve=system, which uses the O_NOATIME feature
49 of recent Linux kernels to avoid some problems when preserving file
52 ** New option --delay-directory-restore delays restoring modification times
53 and permissions of extracted directories until the end of extraction.
54 This is necessary for restoring from archives with unusual member
55 ordering (in particular, those created with --no-recursion option).
56 This option is implied when restoring from incremental archives.
58 ** New option --restrict prohibits use of some potentially harmful tar
59 options. Currently it disables '!' escape in multi-volume name menu.
61 ** New options --quoting-style and --quote-chars control the way tar
62 quotes member names on output. The --quoting-style takes an argument
63 specifying the quoting style to use (literal, shell, shell-always,
64 c, escape, locale, clocale). The argument to --quote-chars is a string
65 specifying characters to quote, even if the selected quoting style
66 would not quote them otherwise. The option --no-quote-chars is
67 provided to disable quoting certain characters.
69 ** The end-of-volume script (introduced with --info-script option) can
70 get current archive name from the environment variable TAR_ARCHIVE and
71 the volume number from the variable TAR_VOLUME. It can alter the
72 archive name by writing new name to the file descriptor 3.
74 ** Better support for full-resolution time stamps. Tar cannot restore
75 time stamps to full nanosecond resolution, though, until the kernel
76 guys get their act together and give us a system call to set file time
77 stamps to nanosecond resolution.
79 ** The -v option now prints time stamps only to 1-minute resolution,
80 not full resolution, to avoid using up too many output columns.
81 Nanosecond resolution is now supported, but that would be too much.
85 ** Allow non-option arguments to be interspersed with options.
86 ** When extracting or listing archives in old GNU format, tar
87 used to read an extra block of data after a long name header
88 if length of the member name was divisible by block size (512).
89 Consequently, the file pointer was set off and the next member
90 was not processed correctly.
91 ** Previous version created invalid archives when files shrink
93 ** Compare mode (tar d) hanged when trying to compare file contents.
94 ** Previous versions in certain cases failed to restore directory
96 ** When creating an archive, do not attempt to store files whose
97 meta-data cannot be stored in the header due to format limitations
98 (for ustar and v7 formats).
99 ** The --version option now also outputs information about copyright,
100 license, and credits. This reverts to the behavior of tar 1.14 and
101 earlier, and conforms to the GNU coding standards. The --license (-L)
102 option introduced in tar 1.15 has been removed, since it's no longer
106 version 1.15.1 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-12-21
108 This version fixes a bug introduced in 1.15 which caused
109 tar to refuse to extract files from standard input.
112 version 1.15 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-12-20
114 * Compressed archives are recognised automatically, it is no longer
115 necessary to specify -Z, -z, or -j options to read them. Thus, you can
116 now run `tar tf archive.tar.gz'.
118 * When restoring incremental dumps, --one-file-system option
119 prevents directory hierarchies residing on different devices
122 With the previous versions of tar it was dangerous to create
123 incremental dumps with --one-file-system option, since they
124 would recursively remove mount points when restoring from the
125 back up. This change fixes the bug.
127 * Renamed --strip-path to --strip-components for consistency with
130 * Skipping archive members is sped up if the archive media supports
133 * Restore script starts restoring only if it is given --all (-a) option,
134 or some patterns. This is to prevent accidental restores.
136 * `tar --verify' prints a warning if during archive creation some of
137 the file names had their prefixes stripped off.
139 * New option --exclude-caches instructs tar to exclude cache directories
140 automatically on archive creation. Cache directories are those
141 containing a standardized tag file, as specified at:
143 http://www.brynosaurus.com/cachedir/spec.html
145 * New configure option --with-rmt allows to specify full path name to
146 the `rmt' utility. This supersedes DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND variable
147 introduced in version 1.14
149 * New configure variable DEFAULT_RMT_DIR allows to specify the directory
150 where to install `rmt' utility. This is necessary since modifying
151 --libexecdir as was suggested for version 1.14 produced a side effect: it
152 also modified installation prefix for backup scripts (if
153 --enable-backup-scripts was given).
156 ** Fixed flow in recognizing files to be included in incremental dumps.
157 ** Correctly recognize sparse archive members when used with -T option.
158 ** GNU multivolume headers cannot store filenames longer than 100 characters.
159 Do not allow multivolume archives to begin with such filenames.
160 ** If a member with link count > 2 was stored in the archive twice,
161 previous versions of tar were not able to extract it, since they
162 were trying to link the file to itself, which always failed and
163 lead to removing the already extracted copy. Preserve the first
164 extracted copy in such cases.
165 ** Restore script was passing improper argument to tar --listed option (which
166 didn't affect the functionality, but was logically incorrect).
167 ** Fixed verification of created archives.
168 ** Fixed unquoting of file names containing backslash escapes (previous
169 versions failed to recognize \a and \v).
170 ** When attempting to delete a non-existing member from the archive, previous
171 versions of tar used to overwrite last archive block with zeroes.
174 version 1.14 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2004-05-11
176 * Added support for POSIX.1-2001 and ustar archive formats.
177 * New option --format allows to select the output archive format
178 * The default output format can be selected at configuration time
179 by presetting the environment variable DEFAULT_ARCHIVE_FORMAT.
180 Allowed values are GNU, V7, OLDGNU and POSIX.
181 * New option --strip-path allows to cut off a given number of
182 path elements from the name of the file being extracted.
184 * New options --index-file, --no-overwrite-dir. The --overwrite-dir
185 option is now the default; use --no-overwrite-dir if you prefer
186 the previous default behavior.
188 * The semantics of -o option is changed. When extracting, it
189 does the same as --no-same-owner GNU tar option. This is compatible
190 with UNIX98 tar. Otherwise, its effect is the same as that of
191 --old-archive option. This latter is deprecated and will be removed
194 * New option --check-links prints a message if not all links are dumped
195 for a file being archived. This corresponds to the UNIX98 -l option.
196 The current semantics of the -l option is retained for compatibility
197 with previous releases, however such usage is strongly deprecated as
198 the option will change to its UNIX98 semantics in the future releases.
200 * New option --occurrence[=N] can be used in conjunction with one of
201 the subcommands --delete, --diff, --extract or --list when a list of
202 files is given either on the command line or via -T option. This
203 option instructs tar to process only the Nth occurrence of each named
204 file. N defaults to 1, so `tar -x -f archive --occurrence filename'
205 extracts the first occurrence of `filename' from `archive'
206 and terminates without scanning to the end of the archive.
208 * New option --pax-option allows to control the handling of POSIX
209 keywords in `pax' extended headers. It is equivalent to `pax'
212 * --incremental and --listed-incremental options work correctly on
213 individual files, as well as on directories.
215 * New scripts: backup (replaces old level-0 and level-1) and restore.
216 The scripts are compiled and installed if --enable-backup-scripts
217 option is given to configure.
219 * By default tar searches "rmt" utility in "$prefix/libexec/rmt",
220 which is consistent with the location where the version of "rmt"
221 included in the package is installed. Previous versions of tar
222 used "/etc/rmt". To install "rmt" to its traditional location,
223 run configure with option --libexecdir=/etc. Otherwise, if you
224 already have rmt installed and wish to use it, instead of the
225 shipped in version, set the variable DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND to
226 the full path name of the utility, e.g., ./configure
227 DEFAULT_RMT_COMMAND=/etc/rmt.
229 Notice also that the full path name of the "rmt" utility to
230 use can be set at runtime, by giving option --rmt-command to
233 * Removed obsolete command line options:
234 ** --absolute-paths superseded by --absolute-names
235 ** --block-compress is not needed any longer
236 ** --block-size superseded by --blocking-factor
237 ** --modification-time superseded by --touch
238 ** --read-full-blocks superseded by --read-full-records
239 ** --record-number superseded by --block-number
240 ** --version-control superseded by --backup
242 * New message translations fi (Finnish), gl (Galician), hr (Croatian),
243 hu (Hungarian), ms (Malaysian), nb (Norwegian), ro (Romanian), sk
244 (Slovak), zh_CN (Chinese simplified), zh_TW (Chinese traditional).
245 The code 'no' for Norwegian (Bokmål) has been withdrawn; use 'nb' instead.
250 version 1.13.25 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-26
255 version 1.13.24 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-22
257 * New option --overwrite-dir.
258 * Fixes for buffer overrun, porting, and copyright notice problems.
259 * The message translations for Korean are available again.
262 version 1.13.23 - Paul Eggert, 2001-09-13
264 * Bug, porting, and copyright notice fixes.
267 version 1.13.22 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-29
272 version 1.13.21 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-28
274 * Porting and copyright notice fixes.
277 version 1.13.20 - Paul Eggert, 2001-08-27
279 * Some bugs were fixed:
281 - hard links to symbolic links
283 * New option --recursion (the default) that is the inverse of --no-recursion.
285 * New options --anchored, --ignore-case, --wildcards,
286 --wildcards-match-slash, and their negations (e.g., --no-anchored).
287 Along with --recursion and --no-recursion, these options control how
288 exclude patterns are interpreted.
290 * The default interpretation of exclude patterns is now --no-anchored
291 --no-ignore-case --recursion --wildcards --wildcards-match-slash.
292 This is a quiet change to the semantics of --exclude. The previous
293 semantics were a failed attempt at backward compatibility but it
294 became clear that the semantics were puzzling and did not satisfy
295 everybody. Rather than continue to try to revive that dead horse we
296 thought it better to substitute cleaner semantics, with options so
297 that you can change the behavior more to your liking.
299 * New message translations for Indonesian and Turkish.
300 The translation for Korean has been withdrawn due to encoding errors.
301 It will be reissued once those are fixed.
304 version 1.13.19 - Paul Eggert, 2001-01-13
306 * The -I option has been withdrawn, as it was buggy and confusing.
307 Eventually it is planned to be reintroduced, with the same meaning as -T.
309 * With an option like -N DATE, if DATE starts with "/" or ".", it is taken
310 to be a file name; the last-modified time of that file is used as the date.
313 version 1.13.18 - Paul Eggert, 2000-10-29
315 * Some security problems have been fixed. `tar -x' now modifies only
316 files under the working directory, unless you also specify an unsafe
317 option like --absolute-names or --overwrite.
319 * The short name of the --bzip option has been changed to -j,
320 and -I is now an alias for -T, for compatibility with Solaris tar.
322 * The manual is now distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
324 * The new environment variable TAR_OPTIONS holds default command-line options.
326 * The --no-recursion option now affects extraction too.
328 * The wording in some diagnostics has been changed slightly.
330 * Snapshot files now record whether each file was accessed via NFS.
331 The new file format is upward- and downward-compatible with the old.
333 * New language supported: da.
335 * Compilation by traditional (K&R) C compilers is no longer supported.
336 If you still use such a compiler, please use GCC instead.
338 * This version of tar works best with GNU gzip test version 1.3 or later.
339 Please see <ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gzip/>.
341 * `tar --delete -f -' now works again.
344 version 1.13.17 - Paul Eggert, 2000-01-07.
346 * `tar --delete -f -' is no longer allowed; it was too buggy.
347 * Diagnostic messages have been made more regular and consistent.
350 version 1.13.16 - Paul Eggert, 1999-12-13.
352 * By default, tar now refuses to overwrite an existing file when
353 extracting files from an archive; instead, it removes the file
354 before extracting it. If the existing file is a symbolic link, the
355 link is removed and not the pointed-to file. There is one
356 exception: existing nonempty directories are not removed, nor are
357 their ownerships or permissions extracted. This fixes some
358 longstanding security problems.
360 The new --overwrite option enables the old default behavior.
362 For regular files, tar implements this change by using the O_EXCL
363 option of `open' to ensure that it creates the file; if this fails, it
364 removes the file and tries again. This is similar to the behavior of
365 the --unlink-first option, but it is faster in the common case of
366 extracting a new directory.
368 * By default, tar now ignores file names containing a component of `..'
369 when extracting, and warns about such file names when creating an archive.
370 To enable the old behavior, use the -P or --absolute-names option.
372 * Tar now handles file names with multibyte encodings (e.g., UTF-8, Shift-JIS)
373 correctly. It relies on the mbrtowc function to handle multibyte characters.
375 * The file generated by -g or --listed-incremental now uses a format
376 that is independent of locale, so that users need not worry about
377 locale when restoring a backup. This is needed for proper support
378 of multibyte characters. Old-format files can still be read, and
379 older versions of GNU tar can read new-format files, unless member
380 names have multibyte chars.
382 * Many diagnostics have been changed slightly, so that file names are
383 now output unambiguously. File names in diagnostics now are either
384 `quoted like this' (in the default C locale) or are followed by
385 colon, newline, or space, depending on context. Unprintable
386 characters are escaped with a C-like backslash conventions.
387 Terminating characters (e.g., close-quote, colon, newline)
388 are also escaped as needed.
390 * tar now ignores socket files when creating an archive.
391 Previously tar archived sockets as fifos, which caused problems.
394 version 1.13.15 - Paul Eggert, 1999-12-03.
396 * If a file's ctime changes when being archived, report an error.
397 Previously tar looked at mtime, which missed some errors.
400 version 1.13.14 - Paul Eggert, 1999-11-07.
402 * New translations ja, pt_BR.
403 * New options --help and --version for rmt.
404 * Ignore Solaris door files when creating an archive.
407 version 1.13.13 - Paul Eggert, 1999-10-11.
409 * Invalid headers in tar files now elicit errors, not just warnings.
410 * `tar --version' output conforms to the latest GNU coding standards.
411 * If you specify an invalid date, `tar' now substitutes (time_t) -1.
412 * `configure --with-dmalloc' is no longer available.
415 version 1.13.12 - Paul Eggert, 1999-09-24.
417 * `tar' now supports hard links to symbolic links.
419 * New options --no-same-owner, --no-same-permissions.
421 * --total now also outputs a human-readable size, and a throughput value.
423 * `tar' now uses two's-complement base-256 when outputting header
424 values that are out of the range of the standard unsigned base-8
425 format. This affects archive members with negative or huge time
426 stamps or uids, and archive members 8 GB or larger. The new tar
427 archives cannot be read by traditional tar, or by older versions of
428 GNU tar. Use the --old-archive option to revert to the old
429 behavior, which uses unportable representations for negative values,
430 and which rejects large files.
432 * On 32-bit hosts, `tar' now assumes that an incoming time stamp T in
433 the range 2**31 <= T < 2**32 represents the negative time (T -
434 2**32). This behavior is nonstandard and is not portable to 64-bit
435 time_t hosts, so `tar' issues a warning.
437 * `tar' no longer gives up extracting immediately upon discovering
438 that an archive contains garbage at the end. It attempts to extract
439 as many files as possible from the good data before the garbage.
441 * A read error now causes a nonzero exit status, not just a warning.
443 * Some diagnostics have been reworded for consistency.
446 version 1.13.11 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-23.
448 * The short name of the --bzip option has been changed to -I,
449 for compatibility with paxutils.
451 * -T /dev/null now matches nothing; previously, it matched anything
452 if no explicit operands were given.
454 * The `--' option now works the same as with other GNU utilities;
455 it causes later operands to be interpreted as file names, not options,
456 even if they begin with `-'.
458 * For the --newer and --after-date options, the table of time zone
459 abbreviations like `EST' has been updated to match current practice.
460 Also, local time abbreviations are now recognized, even if they are
461 not in tar's hardwired table. Remember, though, that you should use
462 numeric UTC offsets like `-0500' instead of abbreviations like
463 `EST', as abbreviations are not standardized and are ambiguous.
466 version 1.13.10 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-20.
468 * `tar' now uses signed base-64 when outputting header values that are
469 out of the range of the standard unsigned base-8 format. [This
470 change was superseded in 1.13.12, described above.]
473 version 1.13.9 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-18.
475 * `tar' now writes two zero blocks at end-of-archive instead of just one.
476 POSIX.1 requires this, and some other `tar' implementations check for it.
478 * `tar' no longer silently accepts a block containing nonzero checksum bytes
481 * `tar' now reads buggy tar files that have a null byte at the start of a
482 numeric header field.
485 version 1.13.8 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-16.
487 * For compatibility with traditional `tar', intermediate directories
488 created automatically by root are no longer given the uid and gid of
489 the original file or directory.
492 version 1.13.7 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-14.
494 * --listed-incremental and --newer are now incompatible options.
496 * When creating an archive, leading `./' is no longer stripped,
497 to match traditional tar's behavior (and simplify the documentation).
499 * --diff without --absolute-names no longer falls back on absolute names.
502 version 1.13.6 - Paul Eggert, 1999-08-11.
504 * An --exclude pattern containing / now excludes a file only if it matches an
505 initial prefix of the file name; a pattern without / continues to
506 exclude a file if it matches any file name component.
508 * The protocol for talking to rmt has been extended slightly.
509 Open flags are now communicated in symbolic format as well as numeric.
510 The symbolic format (e.g., "O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC") is for portability
511 when rmt is operating on a different operating system from tar.
512 The numeric format is retained, and rmt uses it if symbolic format is absent,
513 for backward compatibility with older versions of tar and rmt.
515 * When writing GNU tar format headers, tar now uses signed base-64
516 for values that cannot be represented in unsigned octal.
517 This supports larger files (2**66 - 1 bytes instead of 2**33 - 1 bytes),
518 larger uids, negative time stamps, etc.
520 * When extracting files with unknown ownership, tar now looks up the
521 uid and gid "nobody" on hosts whose headers do not define UID_NOBODY
522 and GID_NOBODY, and falls back on uid/gid -2 if there is no "nobody".
524 * tar -t --numeric-owner now prints numeric uids and gids, not symbolic.
526 * New option -y or --bzip2 for bzip2 compression, by popular request.
529 version 1.13.5 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-20.
531 * Do the delayed updates of file metadata even after a fatal error.
534 version 1.13.4 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-20.
536 * Do not chmod unless we are root or the -p option was given;
537 this matches historical practice.
540 version 1.13.3 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-16.
542 * A path name is excluded if any of its file name components matches an
543 excluded pattern, even if the path name was specified on the command line.
544 Also see 1.13.6 for later changes in this area.
547 version 1.13.2 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-14.
549 * Bug reporting address changed to <bug-tar@gnu.org>.
552 version 1.13.1 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-12.
556 version 1.13 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-08.
558 * Support for large files, e.g., files larger than 2 GB on many 32-bit hosts.
559 Also, support for larger uids, device ids, etc.
560 * Many bug fixes and porting fixes.
561 * This release is only for fixes. A more ambitious test release,
562 with new features, is available as part of the paxutils. Please see:
563 ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/paxutils/
564 The fixes in this release are intended to be merged with paxutils
565 at some point, but they haven't been merged yet.
566 * An interim GNU tar alpha had new --bzip2 and --ending-file options,
567 but they have been removed to maintain compatibility with paxutils.
568 Please try --use=bzip2 instead of --bzip2.
570 Version 1.12 - François Pinard, 1997-04.
573 * Use shell globbing patterns for --label, instead of regular expressions.
574 * Do not quote anymore internally over the quoting done by the shell.
577 * Offer internationalization capabilities of most recent GNU gettext.
578 * Messages available in many more languages, thanks to all translators!
579 * Usage of ISO 8601 dates in listings, instead of local American dates.
580 * More normalization and cleanup in error messages.
583 * For helping using tar with find, offer a --no-recursion option.
584 * Implement --numeric-owner for ignoring symbolic names at create time.
585 * New --owner, --group --mode options, still preliminary.
586 * Recognize creating an archive on /dev/null, so Amanda works faster.
587 * Object to the creation of an empty archive (like in `tar cf FILE').
588 * Barely start implementing --posix and POSIXLY_CORRECT.
591 * Make a better job at restoring file and directory attributes.
592 * Automatically attempt deleting existing files when in the way.
593 * Option --unlink-first (-U) removes most files prior to extraction.
594 * Option --recursive-unlink removes non-empty directories when in the way.
595 * Option --numeric-owner ignores owner/group names, it uses UID/GID instead.
596 * Use global umask when creating missing intermediate directories.
597 * When symlinks are not available, extract symbolic links as hard links.
598 * Diagnose extraction of contiguous files as regular files.
599 * New --backup, --suffix and --version-control options.
602 * Better support of huge archives with --tape-length and --totals.
603 * Rename option --read-full-blocks (-B) to --read-full-records (-B).
604 * Rename option --block-size (-b) to --blocking-factor (-b).
605 * Rename option --record-number (-R) to --block-number (-R).
606 * With --block-number (-R), report null blocks and end of file.
607 * Implement --record-size for introducing a size in bytes.
608 * Delete --block-compress option and rather decide it automatically.
609 * Rename option --modification-time to --touch.
611 Many bugs are squashed, while others still run free.
613 Version 1.11.8 - François Pinard, 1995-06.
615 * Messages available in French, German, Portuguese and Swedish.
616 * The distribution provides a rudimentary Texinfo manual.
617 * The device defaults to stdin/stdout, unless overridden by the installer.
618 * Option --sparse (-S) should work on more systems.
619 * Option --rsh-command may select an alternative remote shell program.
621 Most changes are internal, and should yield better portability.
623 Version 1.11.2 - Michael Bushnell, 1993-03.
625 * Changes in backup scripts: cleaned up considerably; notices error
626 conditions better over rsh; DUMP_REMIND_SCRIPT is now an option in
627 backup-specs; new file dump-remind is an example of a
630 * Superfluous "Reading dirname" was a bug; fixed.
632 * Incompatibility problems with a bug on Solaris are fixed.
634 * New option --gzip (aliases are --ungzip and -z); calls gzip instead
635 of compress. Also, --use-compress-program lets you specify any
636 compress program. --compress-block is renamed --block-compress and
637 now requires one of the three compression options to be specified.
639 * Several error messages are cleaned up.
641 * Directory owners are now set properly when running as root.
643 * Provide DUMP_REMIND_SCRIPT in backup-specs as a possible option
646 * Behave better with broken rmt servers.
648 * Dump scripts no longer use --atime-preserve; this causes a nasty probem.
650 * Several Makefile cleanups.
652 Version 1.11.1 - Michael Bushnell, 1992-09.
656 Version 1.11 - Michael Bushnell, 1992-09.
657 Version 1.10.16 - 1992-07.
658 Version 1.10.15 - 1992-06.
659 Version 1.10.14 - 1992-05.
660 Version 1.10.13 - 1992-01.
664 * Now uses GNU standard configure, generated by Autoconf.
666 * Long options now use `--'; use of `+' is deprecated and support
667 for it will eventually be removed.
669 * New option --null causes filenames read by -T to be
670 null-terminated, and causes -C to be ignored.
672 * New option --remove-files deletes files (but not directories)
673 after they are added to the archive.
675 * New option --ignore-failed-read prevents read-errors from affecting
678 * New option --checkpoint prints occasional messages as the tape
679 is being read or written.
681 * New option --show-omitted-dirs prints the names of directories
682 omitted from the archive.
684 * Some tape drives which use a non-standard method of indicating
685 end-of-tape now work correctly with multi-tape archives.
687 * --volno-file: Read the volume number used in prompting the user
688 (but not in recording volume ID's on the archive) from a file.
690 * When using --multi-volume, you can now give multiple -f arguments;
691 the various tape drives will get used in sequence and then wrap
692 around to the beginning.
694 * Remote archive names no longer have to be in /dev: any file with a
695 `:' is interpreted as remote. If new option --force-local is given,
696 then even archive files with a `:' are considered local.
698 * New option --atime-preserve restores (if possible) atimes to
699 their original values after dumping the file.
701 * No longer does tar confusingly dump "." when you don't tell it
704 * When extracting directories, tar now correctly restores their
705 modification and access times.
707 * Longnames support is redone differently--long name info directly
708 precedes the long-named file or link in the archive, so you no
709 longer have to wait for the extract to hit the end of the tape for
712 Version 1.10 - Michael Bushnell, 1991-07.
714 * Filename to -G is optional. -C works right. Names +newer and
715 +newer-mtime work right.
717 * -g is now +incremental, -G is now +listed-incremental.
719 * Sparse files now work correctly.
721 * +volume is now called +label.
723 * +exclude now takes a filename argument, and +exclude-from does
724 what +exclude used to do.
726 * Exit status is now correct.
728 * +totals keeps track of total I/O and prints it when tar exits.
730 * When using +label with +extract, the label is now a regexp.
732 * New option +tape-length (-L) does multi-volume handling like BSD
733 dump: you tell tar how big the tape is and it will prompt at that
734 point instead of waiting for a write error.
736 * New backup scripts level-0 and level-1 which might be useful
737 to people. They use a file "backup-specs" for information, and
738 shouldn't need local modification. These are what we use to do
739 all our backups at the FSF.
741 Version 1.09 - Jay Fenlason, 1990-10.
742 Version 1.08 - Jay Fenlason, 1990-01.
743 Versions 1.07 back to 1.00 by Jay Fenlason.
745 * See ChangeLog for more details.
749 Copyright (C) 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003,
750 2004, 2005, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
752 This file is part of GNU tar.
754 GNU tar is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
755 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
756 the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
759 GNU tar is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
760 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
761 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
762 GNU General Public License for more details.
764 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
765 along with tar; see the file COPYING. If not, write to
766 the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
767 Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
771 paragraph-separate: "[
\f]*$"