From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050720 Fedora/1.0.6-1.1.fc4 Firefox/1.0.6 Description of problem: This behavior is new with the tar shipped with FC4. It was not in the FC3 tar. When tar is run with the --newer=DATE or --newer-mtime=DATE option, it spews a line like this for every file not stored to the archive: tar: ./foo.bar: file is unchanged; not dumped This causes our incremental backup cron jobs to be very verbose, possibly concealing messages that could be important. I have searched the tar documentation and have not found any option that allows the user to suppress these informational messages. There should be such an option, or perhaps the --newer option should by default not print these messages, allowing --verbose to be used to cause them to be printed. The latter solution has the drawback that a user might want to see the listing of undumped files but not the dumped files, which is normally produced by --verbose. (Our incremental backups use --newer-mtime rather than --listed-incremental, so that we can use --atime-preserve.) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): tar-1.15.1-7.FC4 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Go to a directory in which files have not been changed in at least a day 2.Give command: "tar -cf FILE --newer=TODAY ." (where TODAY = e.g. 20050802) 3. Actual Results: tar prints list of files not dumped Expected Results: There should be an option to prevent list of files not dumped from being printed, or if there is such an option the documentation should be improved so that said option can be found by someone who is looking for it. Additional info:
Is this fix upstream? What exactly is the new behavior with regard to the --newer output? Does it interact with --verbose? Can we expect the new behavior to be stable for a while?
(In reply to comment #1) > Is this fix upstream? What exactly is the new behavior with regard to the > --newer output? Does it interact with --verbose? Can we expect the new behavior > to be stable for a while? We recently upgraded to tar-1.15.1-8.FC4 from tar-1.15.1-7.FC4 and the behavior is now different: the excess output is present only with the --verbose option. If verbose output is not specified, tar is silent about files not dumped. So the problem I reported is fixed. The present behavior of tar is reasonable. Thank you.