[Bug-tar] Tar 1.15.91

[Sergey Poznyakoff]

Hello,

GNU tar 1.15.91 is available from ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/tar.  The files
and their MD5 sums are:

7fb82ba94751c71eda6450c768f7ac77  tar-1.15.91.shar.gz
a013891a0304d23f87e8b0a4ea9aaa2f  tar-1.15.91.shar.gz.sig
e0962a42610ccc1ba2ca68a2d5c8ae93  tar-1.15.91.tar.bz2
4153c70423aab6b6ec6a3278f9a78423  tar-1.15.91.tar.bz2.sig
fd74a2f1840e80d27bc6cc4bd07d5374  tar-1.15.91.tar.gz
2aabe87c0ea26c84c51e1d446ad4327f  tar-1.15.91.tar.gz.sig

List of user-visible changes since the vrevious alpha version:

* Incompatible changes

** Globbing

Previous versions of GNU tar assumed shell-style globbing when
extracting from or listing an archive.  For example:

  tar xf foo.tar '*.c'

would extract all files whose names end in '.c'.  This behavior
was not documented and was incompatible with traditional tar
implementations.  Therefore, starting from this version, GNU tar
no longer uses globbing by default.  For example, the above invocation
is now interpreted as a request to extract from the archive the file
named '*.c'.

To treat member names as globbing patterns, use --wildcards option.  
If you wish tar to mimic the behavior of versions up to 1.15.90,
add --wildcards to the value of the environment variable TAR_OPTIONS.

The exact way in which tar interprets member names is controlled by the
following command line options:

     --wildcards              use wildcards 
     --anchored               patterns match file name start
     --ignore-case            ignore case
     --wildcards-match-slash  wildcards match `/'

Each of these options has a '--no-' counterpart that disables its
effect (e.g. --no-wildcards).

These options affect both the interpretation of member names from 
command line and that of the exclusion patterns (given with --exclude
and --exclude-from options). The defaults are:

 1. For member names: --no-wildcards --anchored
 2. For exclusion patterns: --wildcards --no-anchored --wildcards-match-slash

The options can appear multiple times in the command line, thereby
changing the way command line arguments are interpreted.  For example,
to use case-insensitive matching in exclude patterns and to revert to
case-sensitive matching for the rest of command line, one could write:

  tar xf foo.tar --ignore-case --exclude-from=FILE --no-ignore-case file.name

** Short option -l is now an alias of --check-links option, which complies
with UNIX98.  This ends the transition period started with version 1.14.
  
* New features

** New option --transform allows to transform file names before storing them
in the archive or member names before extracting.  The option takes a
sed replace expression as its argument.  For example,

  tar cf foo.tar --transform 's,^,prefix/,'

will add 'prefix/' to all file names stored in foo.tar.

** --strip-components option works when deleting and comparing.  In previous
versions it worked only with --extract.

** New option --show-transformed-names enables display of transformed file
or archive.   It generalizes --show-stored-names option, introduced in 
1.15.90.  In particular, when creating an archive in verbose mode, it lists 
member names as stored in the archive, i.e., with any eventual prefixes
removed and file name transformations applied.  The option is useful,
for example, while comparing `tar cv' and `tar tv' outputs.

** New incremental snapshot file format keeps information about file names 
as well as that about directories.

** The --checkpoint option takes an optional argument specifying the number
of records between the two successive checkpoints.   Optional dot
starting the argument instructs tar to print dots instead of textual
checkpoints. 

** The --totals option can be used with any tar operation (previous versions
understood it only with --create).  If an argument to this option is
given, it specifies the signal upon delivery of which the statistics
is to be printed.  Both forms of this option (with and without
argument) can be given to in a single invocation of tar.

* Bug fixes
** Detect attempts to update compressed archives.

Regards,
Sergey