Re: [Bug-tar] [PATCH] add --ignore-missing to ignore missing input files

[Stefan Tomanek]

Dies schrieb Paul Eggert (address@hidden):

> > Because find has more possibilities to select a subset of files to save
> 
> Which possibilities do you use in practice?  Perhaps these can
> be added to 'tar'; that would avoid the security issues
> with the find+tar approach.

"Save all files that have been changed since a specific time stamp, exclude 
directory X/,
exclude files from director Y/ *but* do save directories from it to the tar 
file"

The last point is quite useful for excluding things like
/var/cache/apt/archives; you do not want to backup .deb files in there, but you
do want to restore the directory /var/cache/apt/archives/partial. There are
quite a lot of things that find can, but tar cannot do.

I also spoke to many different people that are in fact using the combination of
find and tar and who are annoyed by tars behaviours of not being able to mask
out files that have disappeared; some of them are already using my patch, so I
think adding it would be a good thing [tm] to distinguish these 'errors' from
real trouble that would be masked by --ignore-failed-read.