I needed to eliminate "symlinks" from the list of files, and then store only the filename in a file used by "tar" to create an archive. I'm already at the directory I wish to "tar", so all I had to do was this:

ls -l | grep -v '^l' | awk '{$1=$2=$3=$4=$5=$6=$7=$8="";print $0}' | xargs -L1 | grep -v '^$' >/tmp/xfiles

I then used /tmp/xfiles as the tar-control file for creating the tar-file. The initial grep eliminates the symlinks, and the final grep eliminates any empty lines, such as those created at the start of the "ls -l" output. I didn't need to use the -a option. That would have taken more work to clean up the file list.

Lastly, I should elaborate on the "symlink" problem. In Linux (Ubuntu), it's possible to have a lower-case or mixed-case symlink pointing to an all-UPPER-case filename, in the same directory. Creating a tar-file from that directory, and moving it to a Mac-system ends up with a tar-file you can't unzip because Macs are case-blind when it comes to filenames, so the original file AND the symlink created a conflict which makes it virtually impossible to unzip the tar-file. Therefore, I had to eliminate all symlinks while making the tar-file.

I must credit Tinkster for the awk-code, which made this possible. Having the full "ls -l" output allows you to pre-process it based upon information in the first 8 fields, and then eliminate those fields to retain just the filenames.

Great you found your solution, but wouldn't be easier ?

Also note that your solution breaks if a filename contains a newline (the only disallowed character in filenames is \0)

Also if it is only for your use, OSX allows enabling HFS case-sensitive mode. Don't know how to do it though.

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To serafean, Ya, that works, but it leaves filenames with leading "./", and it doesn't allow other pre-processing, such as "grep 'Apr 20'" to restrict by date. None of my files ever have an embedded newline character, so I wasn't worries about that aspect. But I do have files with one or more blanks in their names, and I wanted to capture them. Finally, if I don't eliminate the "symlinks", they are included in the output, which could affect 'tar'.

I suggest you take a look at the find man page for such operations. It saved me quite some headaches

serafean, that's good to know. But on my Mac, find doesn't have a -printf operation.