Jacob Elder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2002-10-31 14:21:52 -0500]: > So what is the idiomatic way to guess the size of an archive before writing > to tape?
The silence has been deafening. Probably everyone else is busy and so I will jump in again. > [...previously...] > df reports that I'm using 2882M. > tar --exclude-from says that the backup is 2722M. > du with my tar-friendly exclude from reports that I'm using 2942M. > du without any exclude file reports that I'm using exactly: 2942M. I am not sure of the accuracy you wish. To my mind those numbers are all "close enough" and I would have been happy with that level of detail. If you need to know exactly then I can think of no way other than simply looking at the size of the tar archive. I realize this seems like a lot of overhead. It is a lot of overhead. Hopefully someone else will think of a better way. But I know not the overhead factor that tar needs in order to store files in a tar file enough to be able to predict exactly the size of the archive. tar cvzf - $backuplist | wc -c Recently I posted a snippet to count up the bytes in all files in a directory tree. Perhaps this is useful. find $backuplist -print0 | xargs -r0 ls -ld | awk '{sum+=$5}END{printf "%d\n", sum}' You would probably need to play around with '-type f' and '! -type d' and your exclude options in order to get a list that was the same and generated a representative sized tar file. Directories should probably be excluded from this prediction. Bob _______________________________________________ Bug-fileutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-fileutils