On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 09:24:19PM -0500, Jay Hall wrote: > > On Aug 10, 2009, at 12:09 PM, Roland Smith wrote: > > >> The fact that you are using tar also plays a part. Tar has some > >> overhead to > >> store information about the files it contains. > > Is it possible to calculate the amount of overhead tar will use?
Just execute the tar command, and dump the output to /dev/null through dd: tar -cf - /etc |dd of=/dev/null tar: Removing leading '/' from member names 3160+0 records in 3160+0 records out 1617920 bytes transferred in 0.057690 secs (28045115 bytes/sec) This will give you the exact size without writing anything to disk. Roland -- R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/ [plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated] pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914 B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725)
pgpl10oTLkN2E.pgp
Description: PGP signature