Date: Thu, 20 May 2010 02:26:37 +0000 From: "b. f." <bf1783@googlemail.com> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Cc: Martin McCormick <martin@dc.cis.okstate.edu>, kientzle@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: tar and --include Message-ID: <AANLkTilrvL7wDdpGdyT1YZjrai_f2Se024tBGWr0Bcn7@mail.gmail.com>
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Martin McCormick wrote: >A few days ago, I asked about the --include directive in tar >after things didn't quite work the way the man page seemed to >indicate. One might get the impression that if --include or >--include='*pattern*' was added to a tar command, tar would only >archive what was in the pattern and not archive everything as >its default operation. > > What I discovered was that --include doesn't appear to >do anything at all. The example in the man page shows using it >to filter an existing archive and make a tar file of what was in >the existing archive that also matched the pattern. I never >tried that since that is not what was needed here. There certainly seems to be a bug here, either in the documentation or the implementation. The example you mention works as expected for me on 9-CURRENT, but the --include option fails on, for example: tar -cvf new.tar --include='baz' foo/bar when the pattern baz should match files in the directory foo/bar, regardless of whether baz contains wildcards or not, or when baz is anchored at the start or not. The output is garbage. > ... > The --include directive only seems to exist in the >FreeBSD form of tar. I tried a Linux system's tar man page and >it is not there but both support the -X path/filename for a list >of exclusion patterns. > I don't see your point here. For the sake of compatibility, bsdtar aims to support GNU tar features, but not _only_ those features. The --include option is useful for specifying files and directories to include without having to anchor inclusion patterns from the start, and without having to use tar -I/-T with an inclusion file, or tar in conjunction with find(1) -- so the option should be fixed so that it works. b.
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