Hi James, By "S/390" do you mean "OS/390"? There's no such operating system as "S/390", that's the name of the architecture.
Michael Coffin, VM Systems Programmer Internal Revenue Service - Room 6527 1111 Constitution Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20224 Voice: (202) 927-4188 FAX: (202) 622-3123 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: James Melin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, May 13, 2002 10:10 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: behaviour of tar if you use the -u (update) function in TAR to freshen an archive, what actually happens in the file? Is dead space created? Does the archive file increase in size each time it is freshened or does it rebuild the archive and just update the files that have changed? The reason I ask is this: I've been put in the unenviable situation of taking my linux experiment into production. I am not ready in a number of areas, namely not at the right kernal level to do CDL layout on disk, so I cannot backup using the s/390 disk tools. We do not have and due to budget issues, will probably not acquire Tivoli Storage manager, nor do I have VM and due to the same budget issues, we will not be acquiring VM in the 2003 budget. So my options for backing things up are 1) Tar critical directory trees on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, FTP them to the HFS on s/390 so they get backed up by existant things. 2) Get NFS working on S/390 and Linux so that S/390 can mount my Linux file system and back it up. Given these two options (Or if anyone has a better idea - and no, refusing to go production isn't an option) what is my best course of action? Does anyone have a shell script that tars a directory and does some condition code checking etc? I'm totally unfamiliar with unix shell scripting - I usually use REXX for that in other environments. Thanks gang. I'm In Hell. -J
