tar frustration (was Re: relative pathname question!)

[Greg Woods]

In article <64026 at sun.uucp> pope at vatican (John Pope) writes:
>In article <2858 at ttrdc.UUCP>, levy at 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.

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