Hi, basically im trying to copy a directory tree named a/b/c to another directory tree backup/options both located on my home directory(cd). Ive been messing around with the tar commands but nothing seems to work. Any help would be great.

Cheers

errr, sorry come again :? What are you trying to do?

Maybe you want: man rsync
rsync -av /src/foo/ /dest/foo

or maybe: ls > ~/somedir/textfile.txt

Or a simple: cp -R ./source ./destination

You could use cp (with the -r option so that it will recursively grab directories) for this. tar is usually if you want to backup the data into a single file in case it needs to be restored at a later date, or you are moving data to a different machine. To copy your directory tree, you'd just

Assuming that you only want to backup from that c directory and down. Note that if you omit the /* from the source name, you'll end up with a ~/backup/option/c directory which may or may not be what you want. If you want to do from ~/a down, then it would be just

Tryto keep it simple. In this case, there is no real need to use tar when a simple cp will do. I tried to figure out how to tar/untar in the same command using a pipe, and couldn't figure it out. And really, if it can be done with a single command with no pipes, that will be your best bet, especially should something go wrong ... less steps to look through.

you should hava to read 'man tar'. tar -cf tes.tar a/b/c is command to create *.tar.