Hello All, I'm not a Linux newbie but i feel like one right now :-(.

Okay, i have tried everything to tar my `/' directory and it's not working point blank. Problem is, i can tar / but the hard drive is too small to actually tar it here so i have to mount an nfs mount and then tar it there of course i'm using gzip.

I'm trying to exclude /proc and /mnt but it won't happen.

I have tried using exclude files...
Sometimes i won't get errors and it makes a 45 kb file... yeah right....

Anyone please help me!!!!
aRGGGGG

tar cvfzX file.tar.gz excludefile /

didn't work

tar cvfzXP file.tar.gz excludefile /

didn't work

Thanks for any help guys

According to the man page, the exclude file should be directly after the "-X".

tar cvfzX excludefile file.tar.gz /

Nope, that's not it....
I get an error saying file file.tar.gz doesn't exist, it;'s looking for the exclude file after file.tar.gz...

i can't believe i can't get this work..

Thanks man.

Any more help will be welcomed with digital cookies
haha
no milk sorry

Thanks

Doh!
Did we forget the dash?

tar -cvfzX excludefile file.tar.gz /

You don't have your option arguments ordered correctly:

tar -c -v -z -X excludefile -f file.tar.gz \

With verbose options

tar --create --verbose --gzip --exclude-from=excludefile --file=file.tar.gz \

Any option that takes an argument such as "X" of "f" needs the arg
immediately after that option.

I think that might have worked.....

I actually thought it was the ordering of the options but i had that wrong all along....

I'm actually running it right now and i'll see how if it works....

Thanks for the post and all the help people...

I'll keep it posted...

Thanks vls
Thanks Sepero

Eric

Thanks for clearing that up vls. I looked over the man again and it's not very clear about "-f file". Personally I don't ever use exclude, good work pointing it out.