i was thinking about why tar didn't find you dotfiles, and it just occured to
me. i didn't see what you typed, but i'll be willing to bet you did
something like:
tar jcv * > foo.tar.bz2
so you're relying on bash to hand filenames to tar. you won't get your dot
files this way, since * doesn't glob dotfiles. you shouldn't ever do this
anyway, because the default behavior for untarring is vomiting files all over
the pwd. netscape does this, and i want to punch steve case in the nose
everytime i untar netscape.
if, instead, you did something like:
tar jcv DirectoryWithDotFiles/ > foo.tar.bz2
you would've gotten your tar files. this is because tar was written to
archive, and * was built to noglob dotfiles.
the only other possibility i can think of is that your CPU got hit by a
random cosmic ray, shifting the bits in such a way that all information about
your dotfiles got lost.
pete
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