FC4 tar is out of control

[Les Mikesell]

On Sat, 2005-06-25 at 01:37, Charles A. Crayne wrote:
> I use tar with the --newer option to create incremental backups. However,
> with tar-1.15.1, which is part of the FC4 distribution, I get an error
> messages for each file which is not newer than the specified date -- which
> means that I am getting email messages from cron which are multiple
> megabytes in length. Does anyone know how to suppress these messages
> without sending the entire output to /dev/null?

The 'correct' way to do incrementals with gnutar is with the
--listed-incremental filename
option.  If the specified filename doesn't exist, it is created
with a list of directories and their associated device and
inode numbers and the tar run is a full backup.  If it does exist
you get an incremental run based on the timestamp of the file,
including old directories that have been renamed and their
contents, something other methods will miss.  The file is
updated in place after an incremental run so if you want subsequent
incrementals based on the last full you have to save a copy and
restore after each incremental.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com