On Saturday 02 February 2002 18:28, you wrote: Mike,
I know how bad it can be when you're starting from ground zero. I had the same problems when I had to learn IBM Dos version 2 from scratch by myself. The syntax can be arcane and hard to understand at times. Plus, the man pages are not oriented to new users. The best source of information for new users are HOWTO resources, which list concrete real world examples, put forth in no nonsense easy to understand format. I appreciate these resources greatly because I did not have them 15 years ago when I got a generous crash course by an asshole administrator. There are many HOWTO's, but after checking I found precious little in the way of tar information. This was a little disturbing, as tar is a heavily used resource in the UNIX world. On discovering this, I empathized with your situation even more. To access this information locally on your system, assuming you've got a Mandrake system and I don't have any reason to assume otherwise, put the following in your browser: file:/usr/share/doc/HOWTO/HTML/en/index.html If by chance the docs are not installed, go to the following net resource: www.linuxdoc.org Since this is a new user's list, there should'nt be any subscribers that have any misplaced preconceptions concerning a list member's foreknowledge about anything regarding Mandrake Linux. Having said that, your original question concerned backup programs. That in itself tells us alot about what you are asking. First, whenever you are talking about a script or utility that does backups, it's generally desirable to be able to grab everything in a given location, plus save permissions and ownership information; not to mention the hidden .dotdirs. That's generally what backup programs do. If you tend to back your stuff up to CDRW like I do, you might want to make a tar.gz archive of your directory. In my case, I like to save the home user's directory to a tar.gz archive, then put it on CDRW temporarily until I've upgraded the system to the next latest distro. The following command will save everything unilaterally and keep all ownership and permissions information verbatim: cd /home tar -zxpvf /tmp/storage/home_dir.tar.gz * If you then want to view what you've done after you complete this, you go to the /tmp/storage directory and type: tar -ztpvf home_dir.tar.gz This doesn't do anything but pull a list of what's in the archive. The "z" option on the tar command line tells the program to process the archive with gzip, which gives it a respectable compression; saving you alot of space. Hope this gets you started. Email again if you've got further questions. LX > shane wrote: > > tar springs to mind......... > > If I knew how to use tar to backup / or /home > > I would not have asked the question. > > would you mind to tell me how to do this ? > > > Just smugly saying tar ( Duh ) springs to mind, doesn't really answer > the question. > > For anyone reading this , most of us when we ask a question , we mean > > Ok, HOW do you do that? > > Mike > _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
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