shtool-tarball(1)

Usage

shtool tarball [{-t | --trace}] [{-v | --verbose}] [{-o | --output tarball}] [{-c | --compress prog}] [{-d | --directory directory}] [{-u | --user user}] [{-g | --group group}] [{-e | --exclude pattern}] path [path ...]

Overview

This command is for rolling input files under path into a distribution tarballs which can be extracted by tar(1).

The four important aspects of good open source software tarballs are: (1) unpack into a single top-level directory, (2) top-level directory corresponds to the tarball filename, (3) tarball files should be sorted and (4) arbitrary names for file owner and group.

Options

The following command line options are available.

-v, --verbose: Display some processing information.

-t, --trace: Enable the output of the essential shell commands which are executed.

-o, --output tarball: Output tarball to file tarball.

-c, --compress prog: Pipe resulting tarball through compression program prog.

-d, --directory directory: Sets the top-level directory into which the tarball unpacks. By default it is tarball without the trailing ".tar.*" extension.

-u, --user user: The user (owner) of files and directories in the tarball to user.

-g, --group group: The group of files and directories in the tarball to group.

-e, --exclude pattern: Exclude files and directories matching comma-separated list of regex pattern from the tarball. Directories are expanded before the filtering takes place. The default filter pattern is ""CVS,\\.cvsignore,\\.svn,\\.[oa]\$"".

Examples

 #   Makefile.in
 dist:
     ...
     V=`shtool version -d short ...`; \
     shtool tarball -o foobar-$$V.tar.gz -c 'gzip -9' \
                    -u bar -g gnu -e 'CVS,\.cvsignore' .

Releases

11 releases since Debian 3.1 (Sarge); the text changed 5 times.

--directory since Debian 5.0 (Lenny); -d since Debian 5.0 (Lenny).

Referred to by

shtool(1) The GNU Portable Shell Tool