[Techtalk] Help? tar(1) -X Option Not Working

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Tue, Sep 03, 2002 at 05:12:32PM -0700 or thereabouts, Kai MacTane wrote:

> I'm using Slackware.
[and GNU tar 1.13, which came in a bit I snipped]

> tar cvzf $BackupFile -X /etc/exclude -T /etc/include
> 
> No matter what I do, it still puts in the stuff I'm trying to exclude. A 
> quick test shows I *can* get it to exclude patterns like the '*.o' in the 
> examples, but that's really not going to help here; I want to exclude 
> certain *directory trees*, not certain file types.
[...] 
> >http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=54243
> 
> Well, that helps in a "misery loves company" sort of way. I'm starting to 
> wonder if a bug report direct to GNU is appropriate.

Let me know if you get a reply. I got curious about this and had a
quick poke through the bug-gnu-utils archives myself. 

Specifically relevant to tar-1.13, I found:

  Subject: Problem with tar 1.13: --exclude-file does not work  
  http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/bug-gnu-utils/2001-August/002929.html
  (which got no reply)

  A reply to an unarchived post saying:
  Please send your exclude-file to me as an attachment. - it is important
  to remove all \n\n's from these exclude files in tar-1.13.
  (http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/bug-gnu-utils/2001-August/002766.html)

  Subject: tar 1.13 --exclude bug
  http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/bug-gnu-utils/2001-August/002933.html

  ...I have discovered a bug in tar 1.13 with the --exclude and 
  --exclude-from options: they do not support directories any longer!...
  
  (No reply)

Not much help, but it saves you repeating what I did.

Since I have just remembered it is past the first of the month, I
think I had better go and do some tarfiles myself :) 

Telsa