Paul Bijnens --> amanda-users (2008-10-13 14:18:51 +0200):
> On 2008-10-13 13:55, Jukka Salmi wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> while reading amanda.conf(5) I noticed the following comment about the
>> `include' dumptype option:
>>
>>   All include expressions are expanded by Amanda, concatenated in one
>>   file and passed to GNU-tar as a --files-from argument. They must
>>   start with "./" and contain no other "/".
>>
>> I've been using include lists for a long time now, but some of them
>> do contain lines with slashes after the starting `./'; this seems to
>> work fine, though.
>>
>> So, why are slashes forbidden?
>
> Amanda needs to pass these strings to the gnutar option "--files-from"
> and gnutar does not do globbing expansion on those strings (as opposed to
> the --exclude option, where gnutar will do globbing).
> Therefor Amanda does the globbing before passing the result of the glob
> to gnutar.
> And for this globbing to work (and still be efficient), Amanda restricts
> itself to the toplevel directory (./some*thing) only.
> However, as boundary case, if the path contains more than one slash,
> then the loplevel globbing will not work, but Amanda will pass these strings
> unmodified to gnutar; and there you can get away with it.
> As long as you do not expect that pathnames having more than one slash
> will glob correctly, there is no problem.

I see. Thanks a lot for the explanation. (This should probably be
mentioned in the amanda.conf(5)...)


Regards, Jukka

> This dark corner of Amanda will probably change in future releases,
> so it's best to not rely on this too much.

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