Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Alas we've got this backwards' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Alas we've got this backwards
Authored by: el bid on Mar 16, '02 06:53:04AM
tar cvf /dev/tape "*.tobebackedup"

...mostly won't work. GNU tar (hurrah!) does the right thing here, however.

And just to prove that a guy who's been doing UNIX for ten years can also get it backwards, I've managed to do just that. If you want to save files called this.tobebackedup and that.tobebacked up you do of course want the shell to glob your asterisk, so this is exactly where you wouldn't use quotes. (and of course this will work with any tar, GNU or not).

]]BLUSH[[

What I meant to say was to use quotes to prevent globbing when you're using tar to look into a tarball. Eg, when listing it:

tar tv "*.tobebackedup"

...which is, AFAIK, GNU specific.

Perhaps we can just pretend that the c instead of the t was a slip of the fingers.

--
el bid


[ Reply to This | # ]