Hi all,

Thanks for previous help.
How to include this in script,
I need to tar files which are present in /var/spool/cron/crontabs directory (used for crontab) excluding those files which are having extension .au

/var/spool/cron/crontabs>>ls -ltr | grep -v .au
total 438
-rw-------   1 root     root          16 Oct 19  2008 batch010
-rw-------   1 root     root          58 Oct 19  2008 batch451
-rw-------   1 root     root         752 Oct 19  2008 lp
-rw-------   1 root     root         287 Oct 19  2008 sys
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root           1 Feb 11  2009 root
-rw-------   1 root     qad         2217 Apr  2  2010 batch471
-rw-------   1 root     qad          462 Apr 18  2010 ibi

find /var/spool/cron/crontabs -grep -v .au -exec tar cvf {} \;

find /var/spool/cron/crontabs -not -name "*.au" -exec tar cvf myArchive.tar {} \;

Had you a recent bash, you could use extended globbing:

$ shopt -s extglob
$ tar cf myArch.tar  /var/spool/cron/crontabs/!(*.au)

I don't think this will work at all, because the "-exec" clause of find executes the command for every file found by "find" separately. This means, the first file found will execute

tar cvf myarchive.tar 1st.file

tar cvf myarchive.tar 2nd.file

tar cvf myArchive.tar
find /var/spool/cron/crontabs -not -name "*.au" -exec tar Af myArchive.tar {} \;

find /var/spool/cron/crontabs -not -name "*.au" -print | tar -cf myArchive.tar

Thanks Guys for reply,

I will soon post what I did to get this done.

As your on redhat you probably have GNU tar so you could use the --exclude option:

tar cvf myArchive.tar --exclude='*.au' /var/spool/cron/crontabs

I don't think any tar implementations read filenames from stdin. Perhaps you're thinking of the wonderful pax utility.

Regards,
Alister