[Bug-gnu-utils] Bug in GNU tar ?

[John Lange]

If this is not actually a bug, then certainly there is room for
improvement in the way tar handles patern matching.

Try as I might, I simply can not get tar to ignore paterns that include
"/". Consider the following example:

tar -zvcpf backup.tar.gz --directory / --exclude=var/log .

It simply ignores the --exclude and includes all of /var/log.

By contrast:

tar -zvcpf backup.tar.gz --directory / --exclude=var .

works as expected (excludes all of /var).

I've tried every variation I can think of including wildcards, quoting,
escaping etc. etc. to no avail.

This was all was tried on Linux Slackware 7.1, tar (GNU tar) 1.13.

Though it wouldn't surprise me if technically this isn't a bug, but I
think it could be implemented better or perhaps an example in the man
page?

BTW, one of the reasons I think this is possibly a bug and not a mistake
on my part is because I was working from the following example which is
found at:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/lame/LAME/linux-admin-made-easy/c1315.html#TAR-BACKUP

e.g.
tar -zcvpf /archive/full-backup-`date '+%d-%B-%Y'`.tar.gz \
    --directory / --exclude=mnt --exclude=proc --exclude=var/spool/squid .

Note that the "--exclude=var/spool/squid" does nothing. So if its not a
bug, then I'm not the only one who thinks it should work differntly.

Regards,

John Lange
Darkcore Administrator
address@hidden