With version 1.24 a bug seems to have been introduced. When extracting an incremental archive (--listed-incremental), files that should be deleted are ignored. The script at the end of this message demontrates this. It creates two archives, one full backup and one incremental. Having created the full backup, one file is removed before the incremental backup is created. Extracting both archives into another directory should result in an exact duplicate of the source-directory. Since version 1.24 however the deleted file still remains in the output-directory.
I have tested versions 1.22 to 1.26. While the 1.22 binary is the one supplied with Ubuntu 10.04.2, the other versions were built from the sources supplied on the tar-homepage. Using versions 1.22 and 1.23 the diff at the end found no differences, versions 1.24 to 1.26 resulted in: Only in tmp/out/src/: deleted #!/bin/bash set -u set -e mkdir tmp mkdir tmp/src mkdir tmp/out echo test > tmp/src/deleted echo test > tmp/src/modified echo test > tmp/src/unmodified tar -C tmp/ -c -g tmp/list.dat -f tmp/archive.tar src sleep 10 rm tmp/src/deleted echo lala >> tmp/src/modified tar -C tmp/ -c -g tmp/list.dat -f tmp/archive-incr.tar src tar -C tmp/out/ -x -g /dev/null -f tmp/archive.tar src tar -C tmp/out/ -x -g /dev/null -f tmp/archive-incr.tar src echo Comparison: diff -q tmp/src/ tmp/out/src/
