> No there really is a difference between excluding /foo, ./foo, and foo.
> As you are backing up ".", /foo will not match anything.

Of course

> ./foo will match any foo in the top level directory "."
> foo will match any foo in any directory under .

Not so sure:

banyan<on>:  /usr/local/bin/tar --version
tar (GNU tar) 1.13.25
Copyright (C) 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
You may redistribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public License;
see the file named COPYING for details.
Written by John Gilmore and Jay Fenlason.
banyan<on>: /usr/local/bin/tar cfv /dev/null . | grep jpg
./Images/Picture-2 003.jpg
./Images/Picture-2 005.jpg
./maman.jpg
banyan<on>: cat ../excl
./*.jpg
banyan<on>: /usr/local/bin/tar cfv /dev/null --exclude-from=../excl . | grep 
jpg 
banyan<on>: cat ../excl2
*.jpg

banyan<on>: /usr/local/bin/tar cfv /dev/null --exclude-from=../excl2 . | grep 
jpg

Excl contains ./*.jpg and excl2 contains *.jpg but they both exclude
any .jpg file in any level of the hierarchy.

OK, funny enough, tar 1.13.19 on another machine gives different
results, but still, tar 1.13.25 is recommeneded version isn't it?

Olivier