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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 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 through 1.10, then withdrawn in version 1.11.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tar, and left a few unpublished versions of each.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, 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.
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