find_list_entry.c and "FNM_LEADING_DIR"?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2006, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

> On Tue, 18 Apr 2006, Glenn L. McGrath wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 16 Apr 2006 17:07:26 -0400 (EDT)
> > "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday at mindspring.com> wrote:
> >
> > > all right, but this just leads us back to the original question --
> > > what are the precise semantics of the "--exclude" option?  does
> > > anyone have a clear and unambiguous answer for that?
> >
> > whatever GNU tar does, refer to the info page.
>
>   i *have* checked the info page for GNU tar and it's not perfectly
> clear what the semantics should be.  the info page says that the
> "--exclude" option takes a (hopefully quoted) wildcard pattern as an
> argument.  ok, i understand wildcard patterns so i ran a bunch of
> tests.
>
>   i have a small (gzipped) tarball whose contents include a small,
> top-level "etc/" directory, listed:
>
>   ...
>   ./etc/
>   ./etc/file1
>   ./etc/file2
>   ... etc etc ...
>
> so say i wanted to extract the contents of that tarball while
> (recursively) excluding the entire "etc" directory.  using GNU tar,
> here's what happened with various --exclude option values:
>
>   etc		excluded
>   ./etc	excluded
>   etc/	NOT excluded
>   ./etc/	NOT excluded
>   etc/*	empty directory etc created
>   ./etc/*	as above
>   etc*	excluded
>   ./etc*	excluded

FYI, the one variation that appears to work equally well under BB tar
for recursively excluding an entire directory is "./etc*".  so, for
now, i can just change the exclude pattern i'm using slightly to get
it to work properly under BB tar.  but it would still be nice to
settle this compatibility issue.

rday