From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050524 Fedora/1.0.4-4 Firefox/1.0.4 Description of problem: When I use the -N option to exclude older files from my tar archive, tar prints out a warning line for each file excluded: tar: jane/aol.ini: file is unchanged; not dumped This is resulting in multi-megabyte error logs for performing a perfectly normal operation. The excessive verbiage obscures any useful error messages that tar might be printing. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): tar-1.15.1-5 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.touch -d "0:00" foo 2.touch -d "23:59" bar 3.tar cf foo.tar -N "now" foo bar Actual Results: tar created the archive containing only bar, and printed out tar: foo: file is unchanged; not dumped Expected Results: tar should have quietly created the archive Additional info:
This tar behaviour is typical for all releases and it doesn't seem like a bug. Use: $tar cf foo.tar -N "now" foo bar 2> /dev/null or contact the upstream.
Just another comment: I started seeing this behavior in my logs the evening after I upgraded from FC3 to FC4, so I assumed that tar was what had changed. However, after downgrading to tar 1.14-4 from FC3, I still have the excessively verbose behavior. So I'm not sure what changed, but I guess the change wasn't in tar. I'd still like to figure out what it was and turn it off (without throwing out all the useful stuff on stderr as well.) tar doesn't print out a list of what it excludes when you use the --exclude option, why should it do so with the -N option?