tar help

[Wolf Paul]

In article <1731 at cmx.npac.syr.edu> gefuchs at logiclab.cis.syr.edu (Gill E. Fuchs) writes:
 >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

Note Maarten Litmath's follow-up for correct 'X' option syntax.

If all else fails, i.e. if using the 'X' option doesn't work with your
version of tar, try this:

	tar cvf /tmp/GUGU.tar .

or wherever you (a) can find some space and (b) have write permission.
You can still 'mv' the tar file back into GUGU's $HOME afterwards.