Re: I am so sad.

[Michał Górny]

On Wed, 2020-08-19 at 21:05 -0600, Vince Eccles wrote:
> Dear sirs,
> 
> I worked all day on debugging some important coding in FORTRAN. It was
> tested and working. I decided it was time to tar up the new code and send
> it to a backup machine.
> 
> I intended to type:
> 
> tar -zcf src.tar.gz ./various_*/*.f90 *.f90
> 
> which would have places all the fortran codes in a compressed tar file that
> I would transfer to a new machine.
> 
> However, I typed:
> 
> tar -zcf ./various_/*.f90 *.f90
> 
> and the tar blasted all of my fortran files. I had a backup from two days
> ago, but the lost effort was horrific.
> 
> There needs to be a test to make sure stupid things don't happen.
> 

How is it supposed to know that someone's doing something stupid?
 Pattern expansion is done by shell, not tar.  If you want to be safer,
don't use '-f' and instead redirect stdout.

  tar -zc ./various_/*.f90 *.f90 > src.tar.gz

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny

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