tar problems, trying to pipe through split

I'm using the command

 tar cvpf - / --exclude=/home/jake/backup --exclude=/proc --exclude=/mnt | split -b 1000m - linux

in order to back up my HD, so I can copy it to a bigger one. The thing is, tar isn't excluding the directories I want it to. My assumption is that I put the exclude arguments in the wrong spot. When I run this, it's in /home/jake/backup(a NFS mounted drive, hence the splitting), because otherwise it just writes the split files directly to whatever directory I'm in.

Could someone point me in the right direction?

I could be mistaken, but if I understand tar correctly, --exclude=<filename> means exclude a file; not a directory.

You could try --exclude-from=<directory name> to see if that works.

I though --exclude-from read from a file. Why wouldn't tar have the option to exlude a directory? That doesn't make much sense to me. I suppose I could try it...

Almost everything in Linux is a file, including directories. I think you're right about the ordering. Does it work when you format it the following way?

tar -cv --exclude=/home/jake/backup --exclude=/proc --exclude=/mnt -f - / | split -b 1000m - linux

what I ended up doing was mounting my root drive again, and just tarring that directory, it excludes /proc and /mnt, becuase I just mounted the root partition. I just realized that I forgot to exclude the backup directory. Bummer. Maybe I'll try the command above tonight(as I'm at school right now)

actuallly, as the backup directory was mounted across a network, it didn't get mounted w/ the root parition. However, where I mounted the root partition(/floppy), it copied the directory it was mounted to as well. So now when I try and untar it, it's going to untar to /floppy/<everything that was previously in />. Is there any way to fix this? I was thinking, in /floppy

mv * ./../

Will that work?

I'm not sure why you're having trouble... --exclude works fine for me for tar version 1.14.

Regarding split: the last parameter is the prefix for the filenames. So if you wanted to explicitly specify the sequence /home/jake/backup/linux00 or whatever, you'd use:

... | split -b 1000m - /home/jake/backup/linux

and the numbers or letters would just be tacked onto the end.

I don't know either. I actually ended up using the command

tar cvpf - floppy/ | split -b 1000m - /home/jake/backup/linux

where floppy is the drive mounted a second time. It worked for my linux parition, but when I tried the above command to tar up my windows partition(changed /home/jake/backup/linux to /home/jake/backup/windows), it quit on me, and it was almost done. It had like 1.6 GB more to go, and then it quit w/ the error

tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Suggestions?

Did tar list any previous errors? I've never seen that message by itself but, since you're using the verbose flag, it'd be hard to notice an error. Try routing standard out to /dev/null or not using the verbose flag?

I thought the 'v' meant verbose? I didn't see any other errors, but then again, I wasn't watching every line that came across the screen. How do I route stdout to /dev/null when it's piped, the way it currently is?

The 'v' does mean verbose. It lists all of the names of the files as it processes them. If you have that on, a non-fatal error might be displayed and then float off of the top of the screen. Honestly, I'm not sure about the pipe... some kind of weird terminal magic makes that work.

If you leave the v flag out, it will still display the error messages but not the names of the files.

oh, ok. That might be why I didn't see any error messages. I'll try it w/out the v flag, and see if I get anything. Shouldn't it have quit sooner though?

Not necessarily; it might be a non-fatal error, not serious enough to prevent making the archive. No examples pop to mind, I'm afraid.

Ok, I left the 'v' argument off, and I got the following results

tar: floppy/Documents and Settings/Jake 2/Application Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/wd91x161.default/Mail/mail.spiekerfamily.com/Inbox: File shrank by 11951762 bytes; padding with zeros
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Could I just boot windows, remove that file, and have it work? It's an old file, I don't use windows for e-mail anymore, so it shouldn't make any difference right?