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GNU Tar
GNU Tar provides the ability to create tar archives,
as well as various other kinds of manipulation.
For example, you can use Tar on
previously created archives to extract files,
to store additional files,
or to update or list files which were already stored.
Initially, tar archives were used to
store files conveniently on magnetic tape.
The name "Tar" comes from this use;
it stands for
ape
ar
chiver.
Despite the utility's name, Tar can direct its output to
available devices, files, or other programs (using pipes),
it can even access remote devices or files (as archives).
Downloading
Tar
Tar
can be found on the main GNU ftp server:
(via HTTP) and
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/tar/
(via FTP). It can also be found
on the
GNU mirrors
please
use
a mirror
if possible.
For information about Git access, alpha releases, patches, etc.,
please see the
project's home page
Documentation
Documentation for
Tar
is available online, as
is
documentation for most GNU software
. You may
also find more information about
Tar
by running
info tar
or
man tar
or by looking at
/usr/share/doc/tar/
/usr/local/doc/tar/
or similar directories on your system. A brief summary is available by
running
tar --help
Mailing lists
Tar
has the following mailing lists:
bug-tar
is used to discuss most aspects of
Tar,
including development and enhancement requests, as well as bug reports.
help-tar
is
for general user help and discussion.
Announcements about
Tar
and most other GNU software are made on
info-gnu
archive
).
Security reports that should not be made immediately public can be
sent directly to the maintainer. If there is no response to an urgent
issue, you can escalate to the general
security
mailing list for advice.
Getting involved
Development of
Tar,
and GNU in general, is a volunteer effort, and you can contribute. For
information, please read
How to help GNU
. If you'd
like to get involved, it's a good idea to join the discussion mailing
list (see above).
Test releases
Trying the latest test release (when available) is always
appreciated. Test releases of
Tar
can be found at
(via HTTP) and
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/tar/
(via FTP).
Development
For development sources, issue trackers, and other
information, please see the
Tar
project page
at
savannah.gnu.org
Translating
Tar
To translate
Tar's
messages into other languages, please see the
Translation Project
page for
Tar
If you have a new translation of the message strings,
or updates to the existing strings, please have the changes made in this
repository. Only translations from this site will be incorporated into
Tar.
For more information, see the
Translation
Project
Maintainer
Tar
is currently being maintained by
Jeff Bailey, Paul Eggert, and Sergey Poznyakoff.
Please use the mailing lists for contact.
Licensing
Tar
is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
terms of the
GNU General Public License
as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version.
Releases
Date
Version
Download (please use one of the
mirrors
instead)
Information
2023-07-18
1.35
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Fail when building GNU tar, if the platform supports 64-bit time_t
but the build uses only 32-bit time_t.
Leave the devmajor and devminor fields empty (rather than
zero) for non-special files, as this is more compatible with
traditional tar.
Bug fixes
Fix interaction of
--update
with
--wildcards
When extracting archives into an empty directory, do not create
hard links to files outside that directory.
Handle partial reads from regular files.
Warn
file changed as we read it
less often.
Formerly, tar warned if the file's size or ctime changed.
However, this generated a false positive if tar read a file
while another process hard-linked to it, changing its ctime.
Now, tar warns if the file's size, mtime, user ID, group ID,
or mode changes. Although neither heuristic is perfect,
the new one should work better in practice.
Fix
--ignore-failed-read
to ignore file-changed read errors
as far as exit status is concerned. You can now suppress
file-changed issues entirely with
--ignore-failed-read
--warning=no-file-changed
Fix
--remove-files
to not remove a file that changed while
we read it.
Fix
--atime-preserve=replace
to not fail if there was no
need to replace, either because we did not read the file, or
the atime did not change.
Fix race when creating a parent directory while another
process is also doing so.
Fix handling of prefix keywords not followed by
"."
in pax
headers.
Fix handling of out-of-range sparse entries in pax headers.
Fix handling of
--transform='s/s/@/2'
Fix treatment of options ending in slash in files-from
list.
Fix crash on
tar --checkpoint-action exec=\"
Fix low-memory crash when reading incremental dumps.
Fix
--exclude-vcs-ignores memory
allocation misuse.
2021-02-13
1.34
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Fix
extraction
over pipe
Fix
memory
leak in read_header
Fix
extraction
when . and .. are unreadable
Gracefully
handle duplicate symlinks when extracting
Re-initialize supplementary groups when switching to user
privileges
2021-01-07
1.33
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POSIX extended format headers do not include PID by default.
--delay-directory-restore
works for archives
with reversed member ordering.
Fix extraction of a symbolic link hardlinked to another
symbolic link.
Wildcards in exclude-vcs-ignore mode don't match
slash.
Fix the
--no-overwrite-dir
option.
Fix handling of chained renames in incremental backups.
Link counting works for file names supplied with
-T
Accept only position-sensitive (file-selection) options in file list files.
2019-02-23
1.32
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Fix the use of
--checkpoint
without explicit
--checkpoint-action
Fix
extraction with the
-U
option
Fix iconv usage on BSD-based systems
Fix possible
NULL dereference
Improve the testsuite
2017-12-17
1.30
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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.
2016-05-16
1.29
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New options:
--verbatim-files-from
--no-verbatim-files-from
The
--null
option reads file names verbatim
New options:
--owner-map=
FILE
and
--group-map=
FILE
New option:
--clamp-mtime
Deprecated
--preserve
option removed
If possible, use
SEEK_DATA
SEEK_HOLE
to detect sparse files.
See
details
2014-07-28
1.28
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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
See
details
2013-11-17
1.27.1
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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
2013-10-05
1.27
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Please see
the
NEWS
file
for detailed information.
2011-03-13
1.26
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Bugfixes
Fix the --verify option, which broke in version 1.24.
Fix storing long sparse file names in PAX archives.
Fix correctness of --atime-preserve=replace.
Work around POSIX incompatibilities on FreeBSD, NetBSD and Tru64.
Fix bug with --one-file-system --listed-incremental.
2010-11-07
1.25
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Bugfixes
Fix extraction of empty directories with the -C option in effect
Fix extraction of device nodes
Make sure name matching occurs before eventual name transformation
Fix the behavior of
tar -x --overwrite
on
hosts lacking
O_NOFOLLOW
Improve the testsuite
Alternative decompression programs
If extraction from a compressed archive fails because the corresponding
compression program is not installed and the following two conditions
are met, tar retries extraction using an alternative decompressor:
Another compression program supported by tar is able to handle this
compression format
The compression program was not explicitly requested in the command
line by the use of such options
as
-z
-j
etc.
For example, if
compress
is not available, tar will try
gzip
2010-10-24
1.24
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See
the
NEWS
file
, for a detailed information.
The
--full-time
option
More reliable directory traversal when creating archives
--dereference
consistency
Extracts symlink attributes, such as last-modified time
and link permissions, if the operating system supports this
Fixed spurious error diagnostics on broken pipe
Fixed
--remove-files
bug (previous version
would fail to remove a directory which contained symlinks
to another files within that directory)
Accepts the
--label
option used together with
--update
The options
--record-size
and
--tape-length
-L
) accept
size suffixes
Fixed dead loop on extracting existing symlinks with the
-k
option
2010-03-10
1.23
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its
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See
the
NEWS
file
, for a detailed information.
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)
2009-03-05
1.22
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Support for xz compression (--xz option)
Short option
-J
is reassigned as a shortcut
for
--xz
The option
-I
is a shortcut for
--use-compress-program
The
--no-recursive
option works with
--incremental
2008-12-27
1.21
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New short option
-J
, an alias for
--lzma
New option
--lzop
New option
--no-auto-compress
Cancels the effect of previous --auto-compress (-a)
option
New option
--no-null
Cancels the effect of previous --null option.
Compressed format recognition
If tar is unable to determine archive compression format,
it falls back to using archive suffix to determine it.
VCS support
Using
--exclude-vcs
handles also files used
internally by Bazaar, Mercurial and Darcs.
Transformation scope flags
Name transformation expressions understand additional
flags that control type of archive members affected by
them. The flags are:
Apply transformation to regular archive
members.
Apply transformation to symbolic link targets.
Apply transformation to hard link targets.
The corresponding upper-case letters negate the meaning,
so that
means
do not apply
transformation to hard link targets.
The scope flags are listed in the third part of
expression, e.g.:
$ tar --transform 's|^|/usr/local/|S'
The default is
rsh
, which means that
transformations are applied to both regular archive
members and to the targets of symbolic and hard links.
If several transform expressions are used, the default flags
can be changed using
flags=
statement placed
before the expressions, e.g.:
$ tar --transform 'flags=S;s|^|/usr/local/|'
Bugfixes:
The
--null
option disabled handling of
tar options in list files. This is fixed.
Fixed record size autodetection. If detected record
size differs from the expected value (either default, or
set on the command line), tar prints a warning if
verbosity level is set to 1 or greater, i.e. if either
-t
or
-v
option is given.
2008-04-14
1.20
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New option
--auto-compress
-a
With
--create
, selects compression algorithm basing on
the suffix of the archive file name.
New option
--lzma
Selects LZMA compression algorithm.
New option
--hard-dereference
During archive creation, dereferences hard links and stores the
files they refer to, instead of creating usual hard link members
(type '1').
New option
--checkpoint-action
This action allows to specify an action to be executed upon hitting
a checkpoint. Recognized actions are:
dot
echo
(the default),
echo=
string
ttyout=
string
exec=
cmdline
and
sleep=
value
. Any number of
--checkpoint-action
options can be specified, the
actions will be executed in order of their appearance in the
command line. See section
3.8 "Checkpoints"
for a complete description.
New options
--no-check-device
--check-device
The
--no-check-device
option disables comparing
device numbers during preparatory stage of an incremental dump.
This allows to avoid creating full dumps if the device numbers
change (e.g. when using an LVM snapshot).
The
--check-device
option enables comparing device
numbers. This is the default. This option is provided to undo the
effect of the previous
--no-check-device
option, e.g.
if it was set in TAR_OPTIONS environment variable.
The
--transform
option.
Any number of
--transform
options can be given in the
command line. The specified transformations will be applied in turn.
Argument to
--transform
option can be a list of replace
expressions, separated by a semicolon (as in
sed
).
Filename transformations are applied to symbolic link targets
during both creation and extraction. Tar 1.19 used them only
during extraction.
For a detailed description, see section
6.7
"Modifying File and Member Names"
Info (end-of-volume) scripts
The value of the blocking factor is made available to info and
checkpoint scripts via environment variable TAR_BLOCKING_FACTOR.
Incremental archives
Improved (sped up) extracting from incremental archives.
Bugfixes.
Fix bug introduced in version 1.19: tar refused to update
non-existing archives.
2007-10-10
1.19
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New option
--exclude-vcs
excludes directories and
files, created by several widely used version control systems, e.g.
CVS/
.svn/
, etc.
The
--exclude-tag*
and
--exclude-cache*
option families work with incremental archives as well.
Fixed handling of renamed files in listed incremental archives.
Previous versions always stored absolute file names in rename
records, even if
-P
was not used. This is fixed:
rename records contain file names processed in accordance with
the command line settings.
Fixed
--version
output.
Recognition of broken archives.
When supplied an archive smaller than 512 bytes in reading mode
-x
-t
), previous tar versions silently
ignored it, exiting with code 0. It is fixed. Tar now issues the
following diagnostic message:
This does not look like a tar
archive
, and exits with code 2.
Fix double-dot recognition in archive member names in case of duplicate
/.
Fix file padding in case of truncation of the input file to zero size.
2007-06-29
1.18
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Licensed under the
GPLv3
Several bugs in the testsuite are fixed.
2007-06-08
1.17
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Fix archivation of sparse files in posix mode. Previous versions
padded sparse members with spurious zero blocks.
Fix operation of
--verify --listed-incremental
. Version
1.16.1 produced a full dump when both options were given.
Fix
--occurence
. In previous versions it continued
scanning the archive even though all requested members has already
been extracted.
Scope of --transform and --strip-components options.
In addition to affecting regular archive members, the
--transform
option affects hard and symbolic link
targets and the
--strip-components
option affects hard
link targets as well.
End-of-volume script can send the new volume name to tar by writing
it to the file descriptor stored in the environment variable
TAR_FD
(instead of hard-coded descriptor number used in
previous versions).
2006-12-09
1.16.1
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New option
--exclude-tag
allows to specify
exclusion
tag files
, i.e. files whose presence in a directory means that
the directory should not be archived.
The
--exclude-cache
option excludes directories that
contain the
CACHEDIR.TAG
file from being archived. Previous
versions excluded directory contents only, while the directories
themselves were still added to the archive.
Support for reading ustar type
header logical records
has been removed. This GNU extension was generated only by very old
versions of GNU tar. Unfortunately its implementation had
security holes
. We don't expect that any tar archives in
practical use have type
records, but if you have one
and you trust its contents, you can decode it with GNU tar 1.16 or
earlier.
Race conditions have been fixed that in some cases briefly allowed
files extracted by
tar -x --same-owner
(or plain
tar -x
, when running as root) to be accessed by users
that they shouldn't have been.
2006-10-21
1.16
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See
NEWS
file for the list of changes.
cpio archive
is provided for those who do not have tar or sharutils. To unpack it run:
gzip -d -c tar-1.16.cpio.gz | cpio -i
2006-06-16
1.15.91
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See
announce
2006-02-19
1.15.90
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Alpha release in preparation for next stable version. See its
announce
for the detailed description of bug fixes and new features.
2004-12-21
1.15.1
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Unpacking archives piped from standard input now works correctly.
This logic flaw was introduced in version 1.15 and has unfortunately
passed unnoticed the pretesting phase.
If you have already downloaded version 1.15 of the package, you
may wish downloading the
patch
, instead of getting the complete new tarball.
To apply the patch, change to the
tar-1.15 directory
and
then use
patch -p1
-p1
avoids guesswork in choosing
which subdirectory to find each file in.
2004-12-20
1.15
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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
and expect it to work!
When restoring incremental dumps,
--one-file-system
option
prevents directory hierarchies residing on different devices
from being purged.
--strip-path
option renamed to
--strip-components
Restore
script starts restoring only if it is given
--all
-a
) option or some patterns. This prevents
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
See
NEWS
for more detailed information.
2004-09-02
1.14.90
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An
alpha
release fixing bugs found in version 1.14. See the list of
user-visible
changes and
ChangeLog
diff for detailed information.
2004-05-10
1.14
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First major release since 1999. See
NEWS
, and
ChangeLog
for details.
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Updated:
$Date: 2023/07/18 15:49:12 $