GNU tar 1.20

[Sergey Poznyakoff]

Hello,

I am pleased to announce the release of GNU tar 1.20.

GNU tar is available for download 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 available files and their MD5 sums are:

832874d7eea94bfe434c48459cbfda89  tar-1.20.cpio.gz
8c6ea0c387ce06f5c8411bce9977641c  tar-1.20.cpio.gz.sig
bf7f6fef042fd453d6465d13eff711a3  tar-1.20.shar.gz
a6724395dd1f341e6bf00486fdedcbdf  tar-1.20.shar.gz.sig
1a7e17f27abf583b3b0bc059a827e68b  tar-1.20.tar.bz2
1e356998c0ec0b1e914ce59b367e0b43  tar-1.20.tar.bz2.sig
c1a4ff43157ac60dd4b96dab09a3197c  tar-1.20.tar.gz
0c5eaacc1805750d2701bda133c6f654  tar-1.20.tar.gz.sig

For more information on tar, including links to file downloads,
please see the tar web page: http://www.gnu.org/software/tar
and the project page http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/tar.

Please email bugs or suggestions to <address@hidden>.

List of user-visible changes follows:

* 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
chapter 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.

The 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 chapter 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.

* Bugfixes.
** Fix bug introduced in version 1.19: tar refused to update non-existing
archives.

Regards,
Sergey