Re: tar --exclude works with Mandrake but not potato

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

Matthew Thompson <mattyt@oz.net> wrote:
>My potato server (ftp/www/mail.mattyt.net) is running potato in one big
>partition (except for /home/ftp/pub).  The easiest way for me to do
>periodic backups is to create one big tarball of the whole installation.
>The way I always did this before was to log in as root, cd to /, and
>execute a command such as this:
>
># tar --same-owner -czpvf /home/ftp/pub/backups/main.tgz --exclude=proc/*
>--exclude=tmp/* --exclude=home/ftp/pub/* *

[snip]

>My problem is that the --exclude command no longer works the way it used
>to.

  http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/59/59829.html

I'll have a look at this, but it's not release-critical so any fix won't
make it into potato. (Using . instead of * at the end seems to cause
fewer matching files to be included, but some of them still make it
through.)

>The short version:  tar --exclude v1.13.17 under Mandrake 7.1 works the
>way it always has, tar --exclude v1.13.17 under potato doesn't.

Hard to say - maybe they have specific fixes in their version.

>I'm kind of pulling out my hair here, guys (especially since I start a new
>Network Admin position next week).  Any help you can give to resolve this
>somewhat bizarre issue would be MUCH appreciated.

You might want to consider using find(1) and --exclude-from instead. If
you use bash's process substitution capabilities as well, you can write
something like this (only semi-tested):

# tar --same-owner -czpvf /home/ftp/pub/backups/main.tgz \
>   --exclude-from <(find /proc) --exclude-from <(find /tmp) \
>   --exclude-from <(find /home/ftp/pub) .

This can potentially be a lot slower, though, so is only a temporary
workaround.

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]