This is the README file for Archive::Tar, the Perl module for creation and in-memory manipulation of tar files. * Installation Archive::Tar uses the standard perl module install process perl Makefile.PL make make test (optional but recommended) make install This module uses no C-coded parts in itself, but it will try to use the IO::Zlib module to read and write gzipped tarfiles. Archive::Tar will still work without IO::Zlib, it will just complain when you try to use a compressed archive or write one, since it obviously can't. * important changes in version 1.03 26/6/2003: This release holds some bugfixes over the 1.02 release, mainly these: - Always do a readlink on the full path, never just the file - Make archive::tar write proper headers when dealing with symlinks For this $Archive::Tar::FOLLOW_SYMLINKS is introduced * important changes in version 1.02 12/6/2003: This release holds some bugfixes over the 1.01 release, mainly these: - Silly thinko fix in File.pm - Quell some warnings if files are empty - The cache of previously added files was not being emtpied Also, some new features are added: - Archive::Tar::File objects now have a C<has_content> method. * important changes in version 1.01 5/6/2003: This release holds some bugfixes over the 1.00 release, mainly these: - Silence some warnings when writing directories to disk. - A { } inside a map was interpreted as a block rather than a hashref constructor -- now fixed. - Fix write() to work again as advertised when passed no arguments. - This also means glob support to write is now definately not available. - Silly thinko of where splitpath() instead of splitdir() was used. Some new features/changes: - Add a new method 'has_content' to Archive::Tar::File. - Cygwin's tests will now also use the 'short' files, since cygwin is built on top of an Win32 filesystem. * important changes in version 1.00 31/5/2003: This release marks the new development track as 'stable'. Version got upped to '1.00'. Not many changes, merely lots of succesfull test reports constitute this version. However, a tiny fix regarding the reserved string 'VERSION' has been applied, as well as a few more FAQ entries have been added. * important changes in version 0.99_06 5/5/2003: This release only entails a bug fix on 0.99_05 -- C<extract_archive> was dealing wrongly with special files such as hardlinks etc. This is now fixed. * important changes in version 0.99_05 30/4/2003: Apparently windows has some issues with long path names. This version introduces an adapted test suite for Win32 machines. * important changes in version 0.99_04 28/4/2003: Make Archive::Tar work happily on perl 5.005_03 * important changes in version 0.99_03 28/4/2003: This release only has bug fixes on 0.99_02. Fixed handling of long file names when extracting with C<extract_archive> Fixed handling of prefixes in tar headers that contain regex meta- characters. Fixed a few spurious warnings about comparing non-numbers. Expanded the test cases accordingly. * important changes in version 0.99_02 26/3/2003: Added options to be passed to read, namely: - extract (to extract while reading) - limit (to limit the amount of files read from the archive) Implemented the '././@LongLink' support, which is GNU's way of dealing with filenames that are longer than 255 chars. Added a global variable $WARN which controls whether warnings get printed or just stored. Fixed a few small bugs that considered files named '0' or '' to not really be files and refuse to package them. * important changes in version 0.99_01 16/3/2003: Total rewrite from the ground up. Removed as many as the nasty bits (no pun intended) as possible and tucked them away. No code from the old distribution remains. Cleaned up the API, introduced clean error handling and just generally removed a lot of cruft. Note that Archive::Tar now requires perl version 5.005_03 or higher to run. Introduced 2 new submodules: Archive::Tar::Constant Simply holds all constants, like block length, tar headers etc Archive::Tar::File Object class for all files in a tar archive, to make for easier manipulataion of the archive in-memory. See perldoc Archive::Tar::File after installation. Added a few features: write() now takes an optional 3rd paramater (prefix) which will allow you to tuck away all files in that sub directory. rename() is introduced, allowing for easy renaming of files in the archive. get_files() returns a file of all Archive::Tar::File objects in the current read-in archive. * important changes in version 0.23, 21/1/2003: Bundled 0.072 and 0.22 to be able to work on Win32 and non-Win32 platforms. Since the previous version is almost 3 years old, bundling seemed like the quickest way to get a working solution again. Archive::Tar now transparently Does The Right Thing depending what platform you are on -- Win32 users, read the Archive::Tar::Win32 documentation! I also suppose this makes me the new maintainer... * important changes in version 0.20: New class methods create_archive, extract_archive & list_archive. Archive::Tar no longer keeps the entire archive in memory after reading it. This results in a major reduction in memory consumption. Added suport for character & block special files. These files are currently created using mknod, so they will only be available on UNIX platforms. See the file ChangeLog for more complete details. * important changes for version 0.08 Fixed (again) the MacOS support and included alpha support for block/character special files as well as improving symlink handling. NOTE: Archive::Tar is undergoing major work to extend the interface and lower memory consumpton. Any changes to the existing interface should be extensions only. * important changes for version 0.072. Fixes a problem with systems that don't like open files being deleted. It also has an explicit copyright notice so folks like Debian can redistribute it in peace, and an new custodial maintainer due to Calle's suffering Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Get better soon, Calle! * important changes for version 0.071 It fixes a bunch of bugs, implements POSIX-style long pathnames and adds a couple of useful methods. It has also been verified to work on Win32. This version also includes a small tar-lookalike program, ptar. There is no documentation beyond a usage message, but if you've ever used at Unix-style tar program it should be very familiar. Unless something really strange and terrible shows up, this will be the last alpha-test version, and the next release will be beta-test and v0.50 or something like that. If you use this module at all, please mail Calle <calle@lysator.liu.se> or Stephen <gibreel@pobox.com> and tell us what you think of it. Calle Dybedahl, 33 Aftermath, 3163 (mundanely known as 21 November 1997) Gurusamy "stand-in maintainer" Sarathy, -697 Millennium, 2 (mundanely known as 1 February 1998) Stephen Zander (new custodial maintainer) Day 9, Year 90 of Our Ford (mundanely known as 9 January 1999) Jos Boumans (bundler), 1043188048 (mundanely known as 21st of January 2003)