[SunHELP] Tar & exclusions

[Steve Wingate]

I'm trying to get tar to exclude backing up the /dev/fd directory but I can't get it to work. It still gets stuck on scrolling "a /dev/fd/0 0 tape blocks" forever. This is a Sparc20 w/no floppy at all. Here is the command I'm running:

# tar cvX excludes /

The excludes file contains the following 
/proc
/dev
/etc/mnttab
/var/run
/tmp
/cdrom
/devices
/floppy

I tried a test by running "tar cvX test /var" with the test file only containing
/var/run
and it worked perfectly. I don't see the difference in the two commands besides the target. What am I missing here? And yes, I've been reading 'man tar' for many many hours. I tried putting "/dev/fd" in the excludes file also to no avail. I HATE man pages w/o decent examples. 
This is Sun tar, not gtar.



+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Steve Wingate <stevew at velosystems.net>                  310.544.9920 |
|MCSE, CCNA, no JOB                      Wed Nov  7 09:17:01 PST 2001 |
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|FreeBSD 4.4-STABLE                                                   
| 9:17AM  up  8:52, 4 users, load averages: 0.16, 0.05, 0.02  
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