GNU tar 1.14
Hello,
I am pleased to announce the release of GNU tar 1.14. This is
the first major release of the program since 1999. It includes
support for POSIX archive formats and many new features (see the
list of user-visible changes below).
GNU tar saves many files together into a single tape or disk
archive, and can restore individual files from the archive. It
includes support for several archive formats, support for multiple
archive volumes, the ability to archive sparse files, automatic
archive compression/decompression, remote archives and special
features that allow tar to be used for incremental and full
backups.
For more information on tar, including links to file downloads,
please see the tar web page: http://www.gnu.org/software/tar
and the the project page http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/tar.
GNU tar is available from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/tar and the
mirror sites worldwide (see http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
for the list of those).
The MD5 checksums of the files are:
15af5811eb284dd15cf5e16d3a06df30 tar-1.14.shar.gz
f1932e0fbd4641885bfdcc75495c91b7 tar-1.14.tar.bz2
3094544702b1affa32d969f0b6459663 tar-1.14.tar.gz
The list of user-visible changes follows:
- Added support for POSIX.1-2001 and ustar archive formats.
- New option –format allows to select the output archive
format - The default output format can be selected at configuration time
by presetting the environment variable DEFAULT_ARCHIVE_FORMAT.
Allowed values are GNU, V7, OLDGNU, USTAR, and POSIX. - New option –strip-path allows to cut off a given number of
path elements from the name of the file being extracted. - New options –index-file, –no-overwrite-dir. The
–overwrite-dir option is now the default; use –no-overwrite-dir
if you prefer the previous default behavior. - New option –keep-newer-files instructs tar to not replace
existing files that are newer than their copies from the
archive. - 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. 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 standard
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 option instructs tar to process only the Nth occurrence of
each named 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’- option.
- –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 for doing incremental backups and restorations. 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
- –block-size superseded by –blocking-factor
- –modification-time superseded by –touch
- –read-full-blocks superseded by –read-full-records
- –record-number superseded by –block-number
- –version-control superseded by –backup
- 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 has been withdrawn; use
‘nb’ instead. - Various bug fixes.
Please send bug reports and suggestions to <bug-tar@gnu.org>
Regards,
Sergey