🚀 go-pugleaf

Yo, John, you listening?

A feature I miss from BSD tar is the little known "F" option, which
would tell it to ignore things like core, *~ #* and (I think) core files.
Another F (tar cvFF.. ..files..) would cause it to ignore .o files as
well. I know GNU tar has an "exclude" option that will look in a file
for specific things to exclude, but I'd prefer something that would let me
exclude things by regular expression. Thing would be even more useful
when extended to the 'T <F>' option (get list of files to extract from file
<F>), since I often forget the exact name of a file on a tape.

How about:

tar cvX '.*\.o$\|.*~$\|^#.*\|a\.out\|core' .

to create an archive of everything in the current directory except .o files,
core files, a.out's and emacs backup files.

Similarly:

tar xvT '.*[Ss]cheme.*'

to extract any file with the word "scheme" or "Scheme" somewhere in the
name.

Naturally, one might want to use option letters other than 'X' and 'T'
to avoid confusion.

Hmmm. The more I think about this, the more I like it. If the current
maintainers don't want to do it, I will. (Let me know).

				Jordan Hubbard
			PCS Computer Systeme GmbH, Munich, West Germany
	UUCP:		pyramid!pcsbst!jkh jkh@meepmeep.pcs.com
	EUNET:		unido!pcsbst!jkh
	ARPA:		jkh@violet.berkeley.edu or hubbard@decwrl.dec.com