On Thu 31 May 2007 13:37:36 NZST +1200, Christopher Sawtell wrote: > You have either just discovered a bug in tar or its manual page.
The man page lags behind the info docs, as is common with GNU software. The PATTERN is only mention in the info help, but not the man page. > I couldn't get it to work properly with the --exclude PATTERN option either. This is a good case of technical documentation failing to state all the conditions for something to work. What's missing is that --exclude is positional (i.e. tar is sensitive to its position), and that the --exclude has to be before the first path to pack up. If it isn't, both the '--exclude' and the glob after it are taken as literal paths to pack up, resulting in a complaint that they can't be found. > I'd suggest using cpio instead. I always find cpio a pain and a half as it's seriously non-intuitive, and its defaults suck. > find /dir/one /dir/two | grep -v '/\.' | cpio --create You forgot the -Htar with cpio, or you can't unpack it with tar. See, its defaults are annoying... oh and does it work with spaces in filenames? Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
