tar frustration (was Re: relative pathname question!)

[Daniel R. Levy]

> >tar cf /dev/whatever *

> I would suggest using "." rather than "*" to avoid the expansion of the commmand
> line to ridiculously long lengths.  While the meaning is certainly different, I
> have yet to think of any problems with this method when the intent is to tar up
> the contents of my current directory.

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?  (Say, in a situation
which would trigger a known cpio bug, like inode numbers greater than 65535 or
uid's less than 0 [a la SUN] when doing cpio -c.)  Using the "r" option of tar
with repeated invocations of tar would work all right, but would be blastedly
slow because it would rewind the tape over and over and over.  If I used the
no-rewind tape device, I'd get a whole bunch of little tar archives, one for
each invocation.
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|------------Dan Levy------------|  THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED HEREIN ARE MINE ONLY
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