> I tryed to do a full backup of my hard drive lastnight.  I executed "tar cv"
> and I watched the list of files as they were backed up.  I noticed that
> /kern/root/ is ?? to /.  Its not a soft link.  I don't know what it is but it
> causes tar to do is recurse indefinatley. ie /kern/root/kern/root ...  I tryed
> rm -fr root from /kern.  It didn't do anything.  

I was hit by this on my first try too.

The solution is simple, you may either "umount /kern" (the backup-value
of this would be questionable anyway), or - which is what I prefer -
use either the "--force-local" option of tar to prevent it to enter other
file systems (which is not what you want if you have more than one) or
"--exclude" to leave out a specified file or directory. If you do the later,
watch out for the "--absolute-paths" (or -P) option.



Martin

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