On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 10:44:47AM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:

> >> > and put "/media" into /.amanda.exclude on that host, but this
> >> You need to put "./media" into the exclude file.
> >Huh? How comes that this makes a difference on the root-filesystem? 
> 
> Perhaps the reason for that syntax needs to be repeated.
> 
> Tar, in its traversal of a file system, looks at subdirs in the ./ 
> world, where the dot anchors it to the current directory.  It does not 
> look any further down the tree than the one its currently "cd'd" to.  

Well, the confusing bit here is that tar does a _string_ comparison.

In the above case the DLE in question was the root-directory.  In
filesystem semantics "/media" and "./media" is aequivalent as long as
you are cd'd into / (as it was in this case).

> It has no view of, or knowledge of, any file not in its currently being 
> addressed directory.

But in this case "/media" actually _was_ in its currently addressed
directory.  The real problem here is two-fold:

1. when creating an archive of the root-directory, gnutar (by default,
   you can switch this off) prepends a dot to all path names.  Gnutar
   has a reason to do this, but that's a different story.

2. when matching for exclusion, tar ignores the fact that it has prepended
   the dot, thus the match fails.

All that is no big deal.  But I think it would be good to put a notice
into the man page that the paths should _always_ be given relative even
if the DLE in question is the root directory.  I just re-read the man
page.  There is no notice at all that they need to be given relatively.