[ale] tar weirdness

[Geoffrey]

Joe wrote:
> "Michael D. Hirsch" <mhirsch at nubridges.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>On Friday 24 January 2003 09:58 am, James P. Kinney III wrote:
>>
>>>Tar is not working the way I think it is suppose to. I want to tarball a
>>>directory EXCEPT for files ending in .gdbm
>>>
>>>tar cvzf tarball.tar.gz --exclude dir/*.gdbm dir
>>>
>>>All it tars ARE the gdbm files. Does tar not support globing?
>>
>>The man page and the info page on tar disagree on the usage of this flag.  
>>The man page says:
>>--exclude FILE           
>>	exclude file FILE
>>But the info page says:
>> `--exclude=PATTERN'
>>      Causes `tar' to ignore files that match the PATTERN.
> 
> 
> It is my belief (unconfirmed by any clever ploy such as, oh, reading
> the docs) that the way "getopt" works is that double-dash options
> *always* have their argument "attached" to them with an = sign.
> So in Jim's original command,
> 
> tar cvf file.tar --exclude "*foo*" dir
> 
> tar says to itself, "OK, he's asking me to exclude *nothing*, and
> tar up every *foo* and dir." But if instead you say:
> 
> tar cvf file.tar "--exclude=*foo*" dir
> 
> it should work. (Note that you gotta have the "" around the
> pattern to avoid the shell globbing it before tar gets
> a chance to.)
> 
> And a brief experiment confirms that, in fact, it works :-)

But, so does:

tar --exclude '*catalog*' -tvzf tarball.tgz

Which does not meet the above criteria.

> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -- Joe
> _______________________________________________
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> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> 
> 

-- 
Until later: Geoffrey		esoteric at 3times25.net

The latest, most widespread virus?  Microsoft end user agreement.
Think about it...

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