(tar)Authors

Bug reports

What tar Does

Introduction

GNU `tar' Authors
=================

   GNU `tar' was originally written by John Gilmore, and modified by
many people.  The GNU enhancements were written by Jay Fenlason, and
the whole package has been further maintained by Michael Bushnell, then
Franc,ois Pinard, with the help of numerous and kind users.  I wish to
stress that `tar' is somewhat a collective work, and owe much to all
those people who reported problems, offerred solutions and other
insights, or shared their thoughts and suggestions.  Even if we lost
track of many of those contributors, a partial list can be found in the
`THANKS' file from the GNU `tar' distribution.

   Jay Fenlason put together a draft of a GNU `tar' manual, also
borrowing notes from the original man page from John Gilmore, this
draft has been distributed in `tar' versions 1.04 (or even before?)
through 1.10, then withdrawn in version 1.11.  Michael Bushnell and Amy
Gorin worked at a tutorial and manual for GNU `tar', and left a few
unpublished versions of each.  For version 1.11.8, Franc,ois Pinard put
together a new manual by grabbing from all these sources and merging
them in a single manual.

   I heard that there is another manual in the works, by another team,
which should say everything about archives and related utilities, and
which will surely be nicer than this one.  In the meantime, please
consider this manual is a placeholder for `tar' option list and a few
random notes the maintainer wants to save somewhere, so users can read
them.  I wish GNU `tar' users will be happier with this imperfect
manual than with no documentation at all.