Tar

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Table of Contents


Introduction to Tar

The Tar program 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 tape archiver. 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).

Additional information about the project, including links to the project development page and file downloads, is available from the GNU software directory.

Downloading Tar

Stable versions of GNU Tar can be found on in the subdirectory /gnu/tar/ on your favorite GNU mirror. For other ways to obtain Tar, please read How to get GNU Software

Latest intermediate snapshots are available from tar snapshot ftp. Alpha releases are distributed from alpha.gnu.org.

For information about CVS access, alpha releases, patches, etc., please see the project's home page.

Manual

GNU Tar is fully documented. Complete documentation in Texinfo format is included in the distribution. An online manual is available in various formats.

Mailing lists

If you wish to send a bug report, a feature request, or simply to share your thoughts about GNU tar, please write to <bug-tar@gnu.org>. Notice, that this is a moderated list, i.e. postings from non-subscribers are held until one of moderators has time to approve them. To subscribe to the list, visit http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-tar.

Releases

Date Version Download (please use one of the mirrors instead) Information
2006-06-16 1.15.91 Gzipped shell archive and its signature
Gzipped tar archive and its signature
Bzipped tar achive and its signature.

See announce.

2006-02-19 1.15.90 Gzipped shell archive and its signature
Gzipped tar archive and its signature
Bzipped tar achive and its signature.

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 Gzipped patch over the previous version and its signature.
Gzipped shell archive and its signature.
Gzipped tar archive and its signature.
Bzipped tar archive and its signature.

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 Gzipped shell archive and its signature.
Gzipped tar archive and its signature.
Bzipped tar archive and its signature.
  • 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 Gzipped shell archive
Gzipped tar archive
Bzipped tar archive
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 Gzipped shell archive
Gzipped tar archive
Bzipped tar archive
First major release since 1999. See NEWS, and ChangeLog for details.

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