Dan Jacobson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Well, it's been a month of me editing various files turning my virgin > woody system into one that actually works :-) , and now boy do I > regret not keeping a captain's log of at least the names of the files > I changed. I was thinking that there would be some automatic way to > detect this --- and you guys are going to tell me how please.
You should have asked this before you began changing all of these files. > Goal: to backup just the changes I made to the "virgin debian system." > Sure hope my backup file will be slim and trim. I will make a bzip2ed > cpio, just tell me the filenames. I will have 2 CD-R's and alternate > appending these cpio.bz2's to them every few weeks and keeping them in > separate places in the house. Try using RCS to track your modified config files. This has the advantage that you will also have a record of all of the changes that you have made. See rcsintro(1) for more information (in the rcs package). The process goes as follows: 1) Install a package (or packages) 2) Check in the file that you want to edit with ci -m"Original Debian version" -l config_file 3) Edit the file (e.g., "vi config_file") 4) Check in the revised version with ci -l config_file Thus, you have a copy of the original file and a copy of your changes. If you are consistent in tracking your changes with RCS, you can go back later and recover your config files from any moment in time. Finally, if you would like to back up your changes to configuration files, simply archive all of the files under /etc that end in ",v", since they will be the RCS files containing the entire history of the config files that you have modified. More complicated scenarios are possible, such as using branches to track changes to the Debian version of the config file and merging these changes back into your modified version of the file. I leave these as an exercise to the reader. Read the RCS documentation to learn how to do this. - Brian -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]