Wildcards in disklist--revisited, only using exclusions:


Hi, all.

To summarize, I'm trying to back up a hashed spool of mailboxes on ourmailserver at work. The top directory of that spool has five hundreddirectories numbered 0-499 and I want to back them up a hundred at atime over the length of the backup process.

The first time I tried, this was according to a suggestion I found inthe list archive. The backup failed because it was looking for the"wildcards" as literal parts of the pathname and not actually globbingas it should. For example, if I give "./[0-9]/",it would look forpathnames containing "./[0-9]/" actually in them, not expanding them asthe wildcards I expressed them to be. The net result is that the mailspool does not get backed up at all because it cannot find that"pathname". The pathnames are in a file passed to the machine inquestion, "trillian", then referenced by gtar's --from-file.

This time, I tried using wildcards in exclude lines. Here's my reviseddisk list entries (the actual directories to be backed up are commentedout for reference's sake):


trillian /var/spool/PO/mailbox/0-99 /var/spool/PO/mailbox {
  user-tar
#  include "./[0-9]/" "./[1-9][0-9]/"
  exclude "./[1-4][0-9][0-9]/"
} 1

[...]

trillian /var/spool/PO/mailbox/100-199 /var/spool/PO/mailbox {
  user-tar
#  include "./1[0-9][0-9]/"
  exclude "./[0-9]/" "./[1-9][0-9]/" "./[2-4][0-9][0-9]/"
} 1

[...]

trillian /var/spool/PO/mailbox/200-299 /var/spool/PO/mailbox {
  user-tar
#  include "/.2[0-9][0-9]/"
  exclude "./[0-9]/" "./[1-9][0-9]/" "./[1,3-4][0-9][0-9]/"
} 1

[...]

trillian /var/spool/PO/mailbox/300-399 /var/spool/PO/mailbox {
  user-tar
#   include "./3[0-9][0-9]/"
  exclude "./[0-9]/" "./[1-9][0-9]/" "./[1-2,4][0-9][0-9]/"
} 1

[...]

trillian /var/spool/PO/mailbox/400-499 /var/spool/PO/mailbox {
  user-tar
#  include "./4[0-9][0-9]/"
  exclude "./[0-9]/" "./[1-9][0-9]/" "./[1-3][0-9][0-9]/"
} 1

This time, the directories to be excluded end up in the same type offile as above, but are fed via --exclude-from rather than --from-file.I looked at the /tmp/amanda/sendbackup.*.exclude files and theexclusions are getting in as they should.


However, they're not being PARSED as they should be.

For each stanza, it backs up ALL five hundred directories. For theentire disklist file, it would back up the hierarchy a complete fivetimes. Apparently because it can't find the specified "pathnamecomponent(s)" I'm specifying. And I suspect that again, you cannot havewildcards in the --exclude-from file like you can't from the --from-filefile. I can't help thinking it's a gtar bug and I can't be sure whetherif it's a gtar bug or if it's that way by design, i.e. you can onlyexplicitly give directories or files while forbidding globbing. gtar istaking those two files and interpreting them literally, not performingany globbing as specified.

What am I doing wrong here? All I want to do in each case is limit itto a certain one hundred directories and I'd like to usewell-established wildcards/globbing to enumerate them.


Thanks for any help.

--Ian.