Really OT: Any tar experts here?

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Mon Sep 13 19:59:46 1999

At 08:12 PM 9/13/99 -0400, Roger Merchberger wrote:
>
>Essential info: Problem is, I have directories that I want backed up, but
>with subdirectories that I *don't* want backed up; yet when I feed the list
>of dir's to tar, it recursively backs up the dir's anyway.

As always with Unix, there's eight ways to skin the cat, and sixteen
if you're god-like enough to write C programs with 'cat'.

I think the easy way would be to write your Perl or shell script
that assembles the list of files to backup, with absolute or relative
paths as needed, and write those filenames to a file, then tell
'tar' to read its names from that text file instead of trying to trick
its recursion into doing the right thing.

This makes the problem more chunkable and more easily debugged, too.

- John
Received on Mon Sep 13 1999 - 19:59:46 BST