* New features
-* Any number of -T (--files-from) options may be used in command line.
+* Any number of -T (--files-from) options may be used in the 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.
+as an option name within the file list file. Now any file whose name
+starts with - is handled as an option. To insert file names starting with
+dash, use the --add-file option.
* List files containing null-separated file names are detected and processed
-automatically. It is not necessary to give --null option.
+automatically. It is no longer necessary to give the --null option.
-* New option --no-unquote disables unquoting input file names. This
-is useful e.g. for processing output from `find dir -print0'.
+* New option --no-unquote disables the unquoting of input file names.
+This is useful for processing output from `find dir -print0'.
An orthogonal option --unquote is provided as well.
* New option --test-label tests the archive volume label.
Tar exits with code 0 if the two strings match, and with code 2 if
they do not.
-If no argument is given, --verbose option is implied. In this case,
-tar prints the label name, if it is present and exits with code 0.
+If no argument is given, the --verbose option is implied. In this case,
+tar prints the label name if present and exits with code 0.
-* New option --show-stored-names. When creating archive in verbose mode,
-lists member names as stored in the archive, i.e. with any eventual
-prefixes removed. The option is useful, for example, while comparing
-`tar cv' and `tar tv' outputs.
+* New option --show-stored-names. When creating an archive in verbose mode,
+it lists member names as stored in the archive, i.e., with any eventual
+prefixes removed. The option is useful, for example, while comparing
+`tar cv' and `tar tv' outputs.
* Better support for full-resolution time stamps. Tar cannot restore
time stamps to full nanosecond resolution, though, until the kernel
not full resolution, to avoid using up too many output columns.
Nanosecond resolution is now supported, but that would be too much.
-* Bugfixes
+* Bug fixes
** Allow non-option arguments to be interspersed with options.
** When extracting or listing archives in old GNU format, tar
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
+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
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.
+back up. This change fixes the bug.
* Renamed --strip-path to --strip-components for consistency with
the GNU convention.
seeks.
* Restore script starts restoring only if it is given --all (-a) option,
-or some patterns. This is to prevent accidental restores.
+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
+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
+the `rmt' utility. This supersedes 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
+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:
+* Bug fixes:
** 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.
** 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
+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).
option is now the default; use --no-overwrite-dir if you prefer
the previous default behavior.
-* The semantics of -o option is changed. When extracting, it
- does the same as --no-same-owner GNU tar option. This is compatible
- with UNIX98 tar. Otherwise, its effect is the same as that of
- --old-archive option. This latter is deprecated and will be removed
+* The semantics of -o option is changed. When extracting, it
+ does the same as --no-same-owner GNU tar option. This is compatible
+ with UNIX98 tar. Otherwise, its effect is the same as that of
+ --old-archive option. This latter is deprecated and will be removed
in future.
* New option --check-links prints a message if not all links are dumped
- for a file being archived. This corresponds to the UNIX98 -l option.
+ for a file being archived. This corresponds to the UNIX98 -l option.
The current semantics of the -l option is retained for compatibility
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
the subcommands --delete, --diff, --extract or --list when a list of
- files is given either on the command line or via -T option. This
+ 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
- file. N defaults to 1, so `tar -x -f archive --occurrence filename'
+ file. N defaults to 1, so `tar -x -f archive --occurrence filename'
extracts the first occurrence of `filename' from `archive'
and terminates without scanning to the end of the archive.
* New option --pax-option allows to control the handling of POSIX
- keywords in `pax' extended headers. It is equivalent to `pax'
+ keywords in `pax' extended headers. It is equivalent to `pax'
-o option.
* --incremental and --listed-incremental options work correctly on
* 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
+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
+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
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)
+* Tar now handles file names with multibyte encodings (e.g., UTF-8, Shift-JIS)
correctly. It relies on the mbrtowc function to handle multibyte characters.
* The file generated by -g or --listed-incremental now uses a format
`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)
+ Terminating characters (e.g., close-quote, colon, newline)
are also escaped as needed.
* tar now ignores socket files when creating an archive.
* The protocol for talking to rmt has been extended slightly.
Open flags are now communicated in symbolic format as well as numeric.
- The symbolic format (e.g. "O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC") is for portability
+ The symbolic format (e.g., "O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC") is for portability
when rmt is operating on a different operating system from tar.
The numeric format is retained, and rmt uses it if symbolic format is absent,
for backward compatibility with older versions of tar and rmt.
\f
version 1.13 - Paul Eggert, 1999-07-08.
-* Support for large files, e.g. files larger than 2 GB on many 32-bit hosts.
+* Support for large files, e.g., files larger than 2 GB on many 32-bit hosts.
Also, support for larger uids, device ids, etc.
* Many bug fixes and porting fixes.
* This release is only for fixes. A more ambitious test release,