On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 10:53 PM, Jon LaBadie <[email protected]> wrote:
> The manpage Amanda(8) where "Host and Disk Expression"
> are documented indicates some wildcarding is allowed.
> Thus, for a host where I wanted all DLEs excpet one
> that began with the letter "A" I tried:
>
>        amdump <config> host '[!A]*'
>
> This was a no-starter, giving an argument of:
>
>    Argument [!A]* cannot be both a host and a disk
>
> What have I overlooked in the docs?

The problem is that "[!A]*" matches both a host and a disk.  This
[host [disk .. ] .. ] syntax is ambiguous.  You could have either
meant
  "all disks not beginning with A on host HOST"
or
  "all DLEs on host HOST and all hosts not beginning with A"

IMHO, an ambiguous syntax like this is stupid, because it may work
fine until one day you change the set of available items.  For
example, if you had no hosts beginning with A, then the expression
would work.  But as soon as you added such a host, the syntax would
stop working.

That said, it's the syntax we've got, and backward compatibility is job #1.

Dustin

-- 
Open Source Storage Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com

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