Re: Exclude patterns

[Daniel Staal <DStaal@usa.net>]

--As of June 27, 2014 8:53:21 AM -0700, jerry is alleged to have said:

>     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.

--As for the rest, it is mine.

Bob already answered your tarsnap question, but I'll answer your Perl one 
for you as well:  Perl will work fine without that directory.  It's only 
used by the CPAN program.

However, there are some things in it that you might want: Your CPAN config 
and preferences, for instance.  What you don't need are the sources and the 
temp build files.

So, instead of excluding all of .cpan, I'd recommend this:

exclude /home/user/.cpan/build
exclude /home/user/.cpan/sources
exclude /home/user/.cpan/Metadata

That will exclude the gigabytes of excess data (which you can delete) and 
keep the ~10K of actual useful data.  ;)

Daniel T. Staal

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