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