Checksum: 49300 Path: utzoo!utgpu!woods From: woods@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu (Greg Woods) Date: Sat, 13-Aug-88 19:00:30 EDT Message-ID: <1988Aug13.190030.1495@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu> Organization: G. A. W. Constulting Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: tar frustration (was Re: relative pathname question!) Summary: SCO have a good solution too. References: <1670003@hpcilzb.HP.COM> <5762@super.upenn.edu> <1414@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu> <2858@ttrdc.UUCP> <64026@sun.uucp> Reply-To: woods@gpu.utcs.Toronto.EDU (Greg Woods) In article <64026@sun.uucp> pope@vatican (John Pope) writes: >In article <2858@ttrdc.UUCP>, levy@ttrdc (Daniel R. Levy) writes: >> >>All this points up a "feature" of tar which I find frustrating: if I want >>tar to tape-archive a large number of files randomly scattered all over the >>file system (such as for an incremental backup) I'm SOL because tar wants >>to be told either a directory to completely search or file names to archive, >>via the argument list. "cpio" circumvents this problem, since I can feed it >>a list of files, but what if I don't WANT to use cpio? SCO's version of tar has an "F" option, which allows specification of a filename containing a list of files (ala cpio). Especially useful if `cat filename` give too long an argument list. >As a side note, SunOS has a handy "X" option to tar, which specifies a filename >containing files to exclude from the backup: > > tar cfX /dev/rst8 exclude_list `cat save_list` This sounds handy too. Anyone done any work on the PD-tar lately? It needs multi-volume handling, should have the ability to format floppies, and change devices inter-volume (ala cpio), before I'll bother using it. -- Greg Woods. UUCP: utgpu!woods, utgpu!{ontmoh, ontmoh!ixpierre}!woods VOICE: (416) 242-7572 [h] LOCATION: Toronto, Ontario, Canada