GNU Tar 1.31 Released With Zstd Support

As the first update to the GNU Tar program in more than one year, Tar 1.31 is out today and it has support for Zstd compression.

The headlining new feature to Tar 1.31 is its support for Zstd compression with the --zstd switch for dealing with Tar'ed files for listing, extracting, and comparing. Zstandard-compressed archives are recognized automatically and with the -a option, Zstd compression is selected for filenames ending in zst/tzst.

Tar 1.31 also corrects a CVE vulnerability around the sparse option that could end up in an infinite loop. More details on Tar 1.31 via the mailing list announcement.