bsdtar '--exclude pattern' problems

[Mike Jeays]

On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 08:31, Karol Kwiatkowski wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I upgraded 5.2.1 to 5.3 recently and I'm trying to run my cron scripts
> which use tar utility (which defaults to bsdtar(1) on 5.3) and I can't
> figure out how to use '--exclude pattern' with it. It seems I'm
> missing something obvious here or bsdtar(1) is happily ignoring
> --exclude option.
> 
> my system:
> FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE-p1 #4: Sat Nov 27 19:37:42 CET 2004
> 
> here's what I try to run:
> 
> orchid# /usr/bin/tar -czvf /home/root.backup/test.tar.gz -C /home . \
>  --exclude "root.backup/*" --exclude "pub/*" --exclude "ncvs/*"
> 
> I tried '-W exclude=pattern', too:
> 
> orchid# /usr/bin/tar -czvf /home/root.backup/test.tar.gz -C /home . \
>   -W exclude="root.backup/*" -W exclude="pub/*" -W exclude="ncvs/*"
> 
> Both commands include all directories under /home. However using
> /usr/bin/gtar works as expected.
> 
> Any help appreciated. Thanks.
> 
> Karol

Here is an example that works for me:

tar -czf /usr/tmp/HOME.tar.gz          \
    --exclude home/mike/tmp/*          \
    --exclude home/mike/tmp?/*         \
    --exclude home/mike/moz/cache/*    \
    --exclude home/mike/sylmail        \
    --exclude home/mike/z/*            \
    /home/mike/*

You need to leave off the leading "/", as it has already been stripped
from the filename before the comparison.  Took me some time to work this
out!