GNU tar Changelog

What's new in GNU tar 1.31

Jan 4, 2019
  • Member names containing '..' components are now skipped when extracting.
  • This fixes tar's behavior to match its documentation, and is a bit safer when extracting untrusted archives over old files (an unsafe practice that the tar manual has long recommended against).
  • Report erroneous use of position-sensitive options.
  • During archive creation or update, tar keeps track of positional options (see the manual, subsection 3.4.4 "Position-Sensitive Options"), and reports those that had no effect.
  • --numeric-owner now affects private headers too.
  • This helps the output of tar to be more deterministic.
  • Fixed the --delay-directory-restore option.
  • In some cases tar would restore the directory permissions too early, causing subsequent link extractions in that directory to fail.
  • The --warnings=failed-read option
  • This new warning control option suppresses warning messages about unreadable files and directories. It has effect only if used together with the --ignore-failed-read option.
  • The --warnings=none option now suppresses all warnings
  • This includes warnings about unreadable files produced when --ignore-failed-read is in effect. To output these, use --warnings=none --warnings=no-failed-read.
  • Fix reporting of hardlink mismatches during compare
  • Tar reported incorrect target file name in the 'Not linked to' diagnostic message.

New in GNU tar 1.28 (Feb 19, 2015)

  • New checkpoint action: totals
  • Extended checkpoint format specifications
  • New option --one-top-level
  • New option --sort
  • New exclusion options
  • Refuse to read input from and write output to a tty device
  • Manpages provided

New in GNU tar 1.27.1 (Nov 18, 2013)

  • Fix unquoting of file names obtained via the -T option.
  • Fix GNU long link header timestamp (backward compatibility).
  • Fix extracting sparse members from star archives.

New in GNU tar 1.23 (Mar 10, 2010)

  • Improved record size autodetection
  • Use of lseek on seekable archives
  • New command line option --warning
  • New command line option --level
  • Improved behavior if some files were removed during incremental dumps
  • Modification times of PAX extended headers
  • Time references in the --pax-option argument
  • Augmented environment of the --to-command script
  • Bugfixes:
  • Fix handling of hard link targets by -c --transform
  • Fix hard links recognition with -c --remove-files
  • Fix restoring files from backup (debian bug #508199)
  • Correctly restore modes and permissions on existing directories
  • The --remove-files option removes files only if they were succesfully stored in the archive
  • Fix storing and listing of the volume labels in POSIX format
  • Improve algorithm for splitting long file names (ustar format)
  • Fix possible memory overflow in the rmt client code (CVE-2010-0624)