So the GNU tar developers have a dislike for man pages. So much in fact that since the very beginning GNU tar has never shipped with its own man page and each distribution has had to make and maintain their own man page. Most of them seem to be forks from Debian originally.
Below are the excerpts from the BUGS section of the man page on various distributions of Linux or other OSes using GNU tar. If you have a version that is different from that below, please include your version along with the distribution its on in the comments below.
The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead. Unfortunately, the info document describing tar is licensed under the GFDL with invariant cover texts, which makes it impossible to include any text from that document in this man page. Most of the text in this document was automatically extracted from the usage text in the source. It may not completely describe all features of the program.
The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead. The maintainer of tar falls into this category. Thus this man page may not be complete, nor current, and was included in the Red Hat CVS tree because man is a great tool :). This man page was first taken from Debian Linux and has since been loving updated here.
The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead. The maintainer of tar falls into this category. Thus this man page may not be complete, nor current, and was included in the Gentoo portage tree because man is a great tool :). This man page was first taken from Debian Linux and has since been loving updated here.
Created: 2012-01-14
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