# Ant User Manual

## Tar

### Description

Creates a tar archive.

The basedir attribute is the reference directory from where to tar.

This task is a directory based task and, as such, forms an implicit Fileset. This defines which files, relative to the basedir, will be included in the archive. The tar task supports all the attributes of Fileset to refine the set of files to be included in the implicit fileset.

In addition to the implicit fileset, the tar task supports nested filesets. These filesets are extended to allow control over the access mode, username and groupname to be applied to the tar entries. This is useful, for example, when preparing archives for Unix systems where some files need to have execute permission.

Early versions of tar did not support path lengths greater than 100 characters. Modern versions of tar do so, but in incompatible ways. The behaviour of the tar task when it encounters such paths is controlled by the longfile attribute. If the longfile attribute is set to `fail`, any long paths will cause the tar task to fail. If the longfile attribute is set to `truncate`, any long paths will be truncated to the 100 character maximum length prior to adding to the archive. If the value of the longfile attribute is set to `omit` then files containing long paths will be omitted from the archive. Either option ensures that the archive can be untarred by any compliant version of tar. If the loss of path or file information is not acceptable, and it rarely is, longfile may be set to the value `gnu`. The tar task will then produce a GNU tar file which can have arbitrary length paths. Note however, that the resulting archive will only be able to be untarred with GNU tar. The default for the longfile attribute is `warn` which behaves just like the gnu option except that it produces a warning for each file path encountered that does not match the limit.

Note that this task does not perform compression. You might want to use the GZip task to prepare a .tar.gz package.

### Parameters

Attribute | Description | Required
tarfile | the tar-file to create. | Yes
basedir | the directory from which to zip the files. | No
longfile | Determines how long files (>100 chars) are to be handled. Allowable values are "truncate", "fail", "warn", "omil" and "gnu". Default is "warn". | No
includes | comma separated list of patterns of files that must be included. All files are included when omitted. | No
includesfile | the name of a file. Each line of this file is taken to be an include pattern | No
excludes | comma separated list of patterns of files that must be excluded. No files (except default excludes) are excluded when omitted. | No
excludesfile | the name of a file. Each line of this file is taken to be an exclude pattern | No
defaultexcludes | indicates whether default excludes should be used or not ("yes"/"no"). Default excludes are used when omitted. | No

### Nested Elements

The tar task supports nested tarfileset elements. These are extended Filesets which, in addition to the standard fileset elements, support three additional attributes

Attribute | Description | Required
mode | An 3 digit octal string, specify the user, group and other modes in the standard Unix fashion | No
username | The username for the tar entry. This is not the same as the UID, which is not currently set by the tar task. | No
group | The groupname for the tar entry. This is not the same as the GID, which is not currently set by the tar task. | No

### Examples

      <tar tarfile="${dist}/manual.tar" basedir="htdocs/manual"/>
      <gzip zipfile="${dist}/manual.tar.gz" src="${dist}/manual.tar"/>

tars all files in the `htdocs/manual` directory into a file called `manual.tar` in the `${dist}` directory, then applies the gzip task to compress it.

      <tar tarfile="${dist}/manual.tar"
           basedir="htdocs/manual"
           excludes="mydocs/**, **/todo.html"
      />

tars all files in the `htdocs/manual` directory into a file called `manual.tar` in the `${dist}` directory. Files in the directory `mydocs`, or files with the name `todo.html` are excluded.

    <tar longfile="gnu"
         tarfile="${dist.base}/${dist.name}-src.tar" >
      <tarfileset dir="${dist.name}/.." mode="755" username="ant" group="ant">
        <include name="${dist.name}/bootstrap.sh"/>
        <include name="${dist.name}/build.sh"/>
      </tarfileset>
      <tarfileset dir="${dist.name}/.." username="ant" group="ant">
        <include name="${dist.name}/**"/>
        <exclude name="${dist.name}/bootstrap.sh"/>
        <exclude name="${dist.name}/build.sh"/>
      </tarfileset>
    </tar>

This example shows building a tar which uses the GNU extensions for long paths and where some files need to be marked as executable (mode 755) and the rest are use the default mode (read-write by owner). The first fileset selects just the executable files. The second fileset must exclude the executable files and include all others.

Note: The tar task does not ensure that a file is only selected by one fileset. If the same file is selected by more than one fileset, it will be included in the tar file twice, with the same path.

Copyright © 2000,2001 Apache Software Foundation. All rights Reserved.