jkh@meepmeep.pcs.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) (09/28/89)
Yo, John, you listening? A feature I miss from BSD tar is the little known "F" option, which would tell it to ignore things like core, *~ #* and (I think) core files. Another F (tar cvFF.. ..files..) would cause it to ignore .o files as well. I know GNU tar has an "exclude" option that will look in a file for specific things to exclude, but I'd prefer something that would let me exclude things by regular expression. Thing would be even more useful when extended to the 'T <F>' option (get list of files to extract from file <F>), since I often forget the exact name of a file on a tape. How about: tar cvX '.*\.o$\|.*~$\|^#.*\|a\.out\|core' . to create an archive of everything in the current directory except .o files, core files, a.out's and emacs backup files. Similarly: tar xvT '.*[Ss]cheme.*' to extract any file with the word "scheme" or "Scheme" somewhere in the name. Naturally, one might want to use option letters other than 'X' and 'T' to avoid confusion. Hmmm. The more I think about this, the more I like it. If the current maintainers don't want to do it, I will. (Let me know). Jordan Hubbard PCS Computer Systeme GmbH, Munich, West Germany UUCP: pyramid!pcsbst!jkh jkh@meepmeep.pcs.com EUNET: unido!pcsbst!jkh ARPA: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu or hubbard@decwrl.dec.com