Hi, The attached patch speeds up the performance of --exclude by using hashes (speed gains are seen when using large exclude lists).
The patch can be applied to version 1.19 by... tar xjf tar-1.19.tar.bz2 gunzip -9c tar-1.19.patch.gz | patch -p0 I've added some new tests, in particular the new test "exclude05.at" should highlight the speed improvement if you run the tar commands with the unix "time" command. Is there any chance of getting this included into tar? FYI: I tried submitting a similar patch to this some years ago (I think it was Paul Eggert with whom I exchanged some emails). I can't remember why, but for some reason it never made it into tar. Time to try again! Cheers Phil Proudman
tar-1.19.patch.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data
