TAR with file name pattern handling

[pintcat]

Hi everyone,

I know there are several TAR versions available for the Amiga, but I'm looking for a specific one which supports AmigaDOS place holders for name pattern handling (i.e. #?.txt to gather all files which end with '.txt').
I checked all versions I could find on aminet, but apparently there's only this one which does the job. Sadly, due to a bug it is unable to archive folders. I tried to contact the author, but the e-mail address doesn't seem to exist anymore.

Is anyone aware of another version with the desired (or similar) feature?

[Dopuser]

As I see from the guide there you may "specify file names, you can include them as the last arguments on the command line, as follows:
tar OPERATION [OPTION1 OPTION2 ..] [FILE NAME-1 FILE NAME-2 ...]"

Perhaps AmigaDOS command LIST with argument LFORMAT may be usefull there to produce list of *.txt files at first and then such output to be used as argument for TAR then...

[pintcat]

Using LIST to create and append a list of files to the TAR command line is a good idea. I played around a little with different LIST options and it worked well for files and folders.
Now I'm trying to write a script which enables you to put a list of file and folder names (with or without place holders) and then calls TAR to archive all given files. Using LIST here in a script for file name dumping is a bit tricky, because if the given name is a folder and no place holder is used, it puts the whole content of the folder instead of the folder name itself. Example:
Assuming there is a folder called "DirName",

LIST QUICK NOHEAD DirName#?

...would simply put "DirName" as result. On the other hand...

LIST QUICK NOHEAD DirName

...would of course put DirName's content which, if appended to the TAR command line, would cause lots of "file not found" errors. I honestly doubt that there's a way to force LIST to put a folder's name rather than it's content.

[Dopuser]

Check-out as example how to configure AmigaDOS LIST output (tar options to be configured):

LIST >>RAM:selectedfiles path_to_Dir ALL FILES SUB .txt LFORMAT="tar -options %P%S >>RAM:archive.tar"

You have to execute then script RAM:selectedfiles only there.

[thomas]

Originally Posted by pintcat

Using LIST to create and append a list of files to the TAR command line is a good idea. I played around a little with different LIST options and it worked well for files and folders.
Now I'm trying to write a script which enables you to put a list of file and folder names (with or without place holders) and then calls TAR to archive all given files. Using LIST here in a script for file name dumping is a bit tricky, because if the given name is a folder and no place holder is used, it puts the whole content of the folder instead of the folder name itself. Example:
Assuming there is a folder called "DirName",

LIST QUICK NOHEAD DirName#?

...would simply put "DirName" as result. On the other hand...

LIST QUICK NOHEAD DirName

...would of course put DirName's content which, if appended to the TAR command line, would cause lots of "file not found" errors. I honestly doubt that there's a way to force LIST to put a folder's name rather than it's content.

You can surround the name with brackets to make it always be a wildcard.

LIST (DirName) will just print DirName if it exists, no matter if it is a file or a directory.

However, it will not fail if DirName does not exist. LIST DirName will return an error if it does not exist.


LIST (DirName#?) will work as before (list all entries which begin with DirName).

[mark_k]

Somehow including all files on the command line may not be a good idea, because the length of the command line is limited.

The tar archiver I use (which I think is the one on Aminet here) has an option -T which could be helpful. Running tar without arguments describes that option like this:

-T F get names to extract or create from file F

So you can use List or whatever to get a list of filenames in a text file, then use the -T option to tell tar to read names from that file.

That version of tar is good for Amiga use since it preserves file protection bits, exact datestamps and comments, which other tar ports might not.