tar 1.13 has a bad bug

[Joe Smulowicz]

Hello,

I recently upgraded to a new version of Linux and received with it tar.1.13. 
This version of tar has a bug which was not present in 1.12.  The bug has to do
with the "-X" switch. 

Specifically, in 1.12, I can put absolute path names in the list of files or
directories to be excluded.  In 1.13 only relative names are recognized.  This
is very bad since there's no way to exclude a subdirectory called "ABC" without
exluding all such subdirectories. 

For example, let's assume the following directories exist:

   /etc/opt 
   /etc/codepages
   /var/opt


Under tar 1.12 I can have an exclusion list like this:

   /etc/opt 
   /etc/codepages

and if I give the command "tar -cPf archive.tar /etc -X <exclusion list>" it
will exclude these two directories from the resulting archive.tar file. 


But under 1.13 I can only list the directories like this:

  opt
  codepages

I have no way to tell tar that I want to exclude only the /etc/opt directory
while preserving the /var/opt directory.  The result is I would be excluding
both the /etc/opt AND /var/opt directories. 


PLEASE FIX THIS!
PLEASE FIX THIS!
PLEASE FIX THIS!
PLEASE FIX THIS!


Thanks.



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            Joe Smulowicz      < < < <---> > > >      address@hidden
      PGP fingerprint: 50 EA 8B 22 A0 59 60 D5  DD 4B 04 04 12 26 2E 16
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