Dear sirs,
I worked all day on debugging some important coding in FORTRAN. It was tested and working. I decided it was time to tar up the new code and send it to a backup machine.
I intended to type:
tar -zcf src.tar.gz ./various_*/*.f90 *.f90
which would have places all the fortran codes in a compressed tar file that I would transfer to a new machine.
However, I typed:
tar -zcf ./various_/*.f90 *.f90
and the tar blasted all of my fortran files. I had a backup from two days ago, but the lost effort was horrific.
There needs to be a test to make sure stupid things don't happen.
Vince Eccles, long time LINUX user for scientific programming.