Hello, I always install Debian in one big ugly partition for convenience' sake. Perhaps not the recommended method, but that's the way I do it.
Whenever I wanted to make a big tarball image of my current installation, I always would log in as root, cd to /, and submit the following command: # tar --same-owner -czpvf /syjet/debmain.tgz --exclude=tmp/* --exclude=proc/* --exclude=syjet/* * This would create an image on my syjet without including the junk in /tmp or /proc, or the new image itself. I have done this far too many times to count over the past 2 or 3 years, and it has always worked and proved very convenient for me. I recently upgraded to potato and it seems this no longer works. I just tried to do a backup, and all the files below the directories following the --exclude command now get included. /tmp and /proc are bad enough, but to include the partially created debmain.tgz from /syjet in debmain.tgz would very obviously be ridiculous. --exclude=/proc/* doesn't work, either. I re-read the manpage for tar, and it says: --exclude FILE exclude file FILE I thought that perhaps the equals sign had become unnecessary, so I tried it without, and all it did was tar up the /proc directory. May I ask why the behavior of the --exclude command has changed? Can someone suggest a remedy for my situation? TIA...................... Matthew Thompson http://mattyt.net [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.oz.net/~mattyt --Someday, I'll have a web page.--