tar problems

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 06:51, Alberto Ferrante wrote:

> Well, at the end it turned out not to be a bug. It seems they just
> changed a little bit the syntax of tar. Before you could write
> tar cvjf dest.tar.bz2 source --exclude file_to_exclude
> while now the only accepted syntax is
> tar cvjf dest.tar.bz2 --exclude file_to_exclude source
> 
> Before reporting the bug I tried with different orders for the options
> but not with this particular one (that I do not like so much, to be
> honest). Anyway, this is it.

Does it make a difference if you add the usual leading single - to
the single-letter option bundle?  Maintaining backwards compatibility
to the ancient version of tar that allowed (or perhaps required) you
to omit it has always required some strange parsing of the command
line.  If you include it, can you now do the usual GNUish mix of
single letter and long options?  I guess I would never have tried
putting the target anywhere but as the last thing in the command
anyway - I'm surprised that ever worked.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com