[SOLVED] problem with tar and "--exclude" option

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Wed, 12 Apr 2006, Natanael Copa wrote:

> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> >   (well, sort of solved -- i can at least see what it's doing).
> >
> > given a gzipped tarball with the contents (among other things):
> >
> >   ./meta/
> >   ./meta/postinst.sh   (note leading ".", archive created like that)
> >
> > the busybox form of tar has *very* different behaviour from GNU tar.
> >
> >   if i use GNU tar and don't want the entire "meta" directory, i just
> > need to specify *either* of:
> >
> >   --exclude meta -xvzf ...
>
> FYI. this is how bsdtar works too.
>
> >   --exclude ./meta -xvzf ...
>
> This will not work in bsdtar. Is seems like bsdtar strips ./ in the
> beginning of the filenames when creating the archive.
>
> >   should it really be this non-intuitive and different from GNU tar
> > behaviour?
>
> and its different from bsdtar too.

is there a POSIX or similar definition for this behaviour?  perhaps
this is too simplistic a view but it seems that compatibility with GNU
tar would be a good thing.

rday