Download Tar 1.16.1

Sergey Poznyakoff one of the developers at the GNU Project provided a Tar with a new release with 1.16.1 as the version number. Tar was originally developed to write files in a file archive to sequential devices, such as a tape streamer, while preserving information from the file system. Nowadays it is mainly used in combination with compression programs such as gzip and bzip2 to compress files and folders into a file archive. For more information about Tar, we refer you to this page at Wikipedia. The list of changes for version 1.16.1 looks like this:

Version 1.16.1:

• New option –exclude-tag allows to specify “exclusion tag files”, ie 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 ‘N’ 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; see here. We don’t expect that any tar archives in practical use have type ‘N’ 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 .

Version 1.16:

• After creating an archive, tar exits with code 1 if some files were changed while being read. Previous versions exited with code 2 (fatal error), and only if some files were truncated while being archived.
• New option –mtime allows to set modification times for all archive members during creation.
• Bug fixes
  • Avoid running off file descriptors when using multiple -C options.
  • tar –index-file=FILE –file=- sent the archive to FILE, and the listing to stderr.