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I am running CentOS 5.6 and for some ungodly reason, the version of tar is from 2004, and not compatible with the node package manager (NPM). How in the world can I update it? Is there an additional yum repository I can add, so I can simply execute yum update tar.

Justin
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    What version is your current tar and what version do you require? – MikeyB Sep 02 '11 at 23:53
  • Also, tar is an old piece of software and isn't updated often, why do you need a new version? – Dana the Sane Sep 03 '11 at 00:54
  • @MikeyB Looking at the the CentOS 5.6 FTP site (which seems to be the closest rpm-based distros get to a `packages.` site), it looks like 5.6 has 1.15.1. My guess is that in 2006 when 1.15.91 changed file globbing to require `--wildcard`, RHEL/CentOS kept the old version rather than changing their programs. – DerfK Sep 03 '11 at 02:51

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The CentOS6 package fails dependencies on 5.6, so, you probably will need to build it yourself, either nicely packaged or not. I don't seen an updated "tar" package up at Dag or Karan.

cjc
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  • Which dependencies? – Dana the Sane Sep 03 '11 at 00:46
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    glibc, so you're not going to be able to easily work around that one. I just tried a "rpmbuild" on the RHEL6 tar src rpm (GNU tar 1.23), and it's failing because it needs a newer autoconf version. If you want a packaged installation, your best bet might be to grab the 5.6 SRPM, open it up, and modify the .spec file to use a more recent tar distribution. Or, you can just do the usual "configure; make install" thing and put the new one in /usr/local/bin. – cjc Sep 03 '11 at 02:56
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Yes, on my RHEL 5.x system, the package is called tar.x86_64. So yum update tar will fetch the update if there is one available.

Dana the Sane
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  • Yeah that version is way old, I need a newer version, do I have to build from source? – Justin Sep 02 '11 at 22:53
  • No, the package from yum will have the same name. Use `yum info tar` to see the new version that will be available. Also remember that RHEL and Centos are conservative with their package selection, as a result, they don't ship the most recent packages. – Dana the Sane Sep 03 '11 at 00:45