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From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 95) When using tar (GNU tar) version 1.13.17 with option -T <include-file> tar backs up more than the files specified in this file. For example: If the directory /home/myacct/.netscape is specified in the -T file, tar backs up the entire directory rather than JUST the directory. This ends up tarring more files than were specified in the -T file. When the --gzip option is used, the problem appears to be more pronounced and seems to loop on large files backing them up multiple times. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. echo "/home/myaccount/.netscape" > my.list 2. tar -cvPf my.tar -T my.list 3. # You will notice that this not only backs up /home/myacct/.netscape, but also /home/myacct/.netscape/cache, etc. I can reproduce the --gzip problem but the results vary from run to run. The -T file contains ! 9,000 fileIDs. Actual Results: tar dumped the /home/myacct/.netscape/cache/* directory and all it's contents including all the other directories and files under /home/myacct/.netscape. It doesn't appear to do this with the other directory entries in the -T file. Expected Results: I expected the -T option to take the files listed in my.list and only back them up. It should have backed up the directory name: /home/myacct/.netscape and nothing else. The documentation says the file specified by -T contains the files that are to be created. Perhaps the documentation should state that entire directories get backed up. This may not be as much of a bug as I first thought. But the --gzip option did cause freaky results which varied as I tried to re-create it.
The first part is intentional -- echo "/home/user/.netscape" >list tar cf foo.tar -T list does the same as tar cf foo.tar /home/user/.netscape and is supposed to do just that. I can't reproduce the 2nd part on a 7.1 system.