Exclude patterns

[jerry <jerry@tr2.com>]

Hello,

   As a first try of tarsnap, I tried archiving my /root directory, 
which I knew was pretty small.  Or was it?  Not only did it take a long 
time, but the resulting archive was *BIG*.  As in two gigabytes - ish.  
I did a du -b and discovered a large directory called .cpan.   OK, it's 
the perl library build stuff.  Every time I install a new Perl library, 
all the build stuff winds up in this .cpan directory.  I don't know if 
Perl will work right anymore if I delete this stuff, but I'm pretty sure 
I have no interest in backing it up, because I can always get it off 
CPAN again.

  That leads me to the general subject of excludes.  I see that one can 
specify them in the tarsnap command line.  There's also some verbiage 
about putting them in config files.  But no examples of that ( that I 
could find ). Can a config file have multiple -exclude lines?

   In general, I like to have excludes in a separate file.  Usually 
named "excludes", at the top of each tree I am backing up.

                     - Jerry Kaidor ( jerry@tr2.com )