----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Nelson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I managed to make it create 0-byte files:
$ touch a
$ tar cvf b.tar --exclude a a
$ tar zcvf b.tar.gz --exclude a a
$ ls -la b.tar*
-rw-r--r-- 1 dan wheel 0 Dec 8 17:37 b.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 dan wheel 20 Dec 8 17:37 b.tar.gz
$ gunzip -vl b.tar.gz
method crc date time compressed uncompr. ratio uncompressed_name
defla 00000000 Dec 8 17:37 20 0 0.0% b.tar
This works because at the time tar creates the output file, it doesn't
know that I have excluded all the listed files.
I am leaning towards an empty archive being legal, though, since it
makes scripting easier. There may be cases where you are archiving
files generated daily, and you want to distinguish "no data today" from
"the archiver didn't run". At worst it should print a warning.
That's the reason here as well. It was a scripted process where we
create a tar.gz of new / changed files and a shell script to remove
old files. As some files had been removed only in this instance we
ended up with a script file with entries but nothing in the tar.gz which
then barfed on "install".
Steve
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