tar help

[Gill E. Fuchs]

hello net, 

suppose i want to tar an entire accound into a tar file named
GUGU.tar

then i type (at the ~ directory)
	tar cvf GUGU.tar .

but after sometime tar tars GUGU.tar recorsively upon itself,
now i have tried all kinds of combinations with the X option for
tar but to no avail, i guess i cannot milk the correct command out of
the man pages

help?

thank you
gill