Yesterday I was playing around with deboostrap and in the manpage I discover the following OPTION:

--make-tarball FILE
Instead of bootstrapping, make a tarball (written to FILE) of the downloaded packages. The resulting tarball may be passed to a later --unpack-tarball.

I think this is fantastic, since I could just download once the instalation deb's and then make several instalations on other computers (instead of make 10 downloads I would do just one).

The problem is that when I use the "--make-tarball:" option the debootstrap returns a error: saying that an argument is necessary to the "--make-tarball" option.

I think it should be something like this:
I think that with this command, debootstrap will create a tarball file with name backup.tar.gz in /home/user.

but I've tried several times and always give the same error:
--unpack-tarball needs an argument.


Can anybody help me with this? I've searched entire web and I couldn't found any good or valid example with --make-tarball option.

Thanks in advance for your help.


(Linux: giving advantage to human beings)

you need an = instead of a : and I don't know if you can compress it on the fly, you might have to compress it afterward

sudo debootstrap --arch=i386 --make-tarball=/home/user/backup.tar hardy /home/user/my_debootstrap
sudo gzip backup.tar