How to archive several files with tar?

[Jonathan I. Kamens]

In article <ADRIANHO.91Jun9105223 at barkley.berkeley.edu>, adrianho at barkley.berkeley.edu (Adrian J Ho) writes:
|> The idea is _not_ to put the tar file in the directory you're tar'ing,
|> because your tar file will otherwise end up being included in itself.
|> In the worst case, it could be the _last_ file included, which means
|> that your tar file could end up being _twice_ as large as it's
|> supposed to be.

  Actually, the worst case is that the tar file will continue to grow as tar
writes into it, so that when tar opens that file to archive it, the file will
grow as tar is archiving it, which means that there will be more to archive,
etc., etc. until the disk fills up or the user exceeds his quota or the
maximum file size or whatever.

-- 
Jonathan Kamens					jik at CATS.UCSC.EDU