RE: Quiet tarring

["Karen Ellrick" <k-ellrick sctech co jp>]

Kevin Colby wrote:
> Your best bet here would really be to write a shell script that does
> the tar process and cron the script.  The script could log the entire
> operation to a file, then reparse the log and reattempt failed files
> and only send "true errors" to standard output (which, being run by
> cron, will get emailed to you).

Thanks for ideas and the sample script.  Yes, I'm using bash, so I can use
your examples verbatim.  At the moment the needs have changed, as all my
users screamed that they didn't want the performance of the server brought
to its knees once an hour to tar the files (the day they complained the
loudest, the company president was on a trip and hadn't gotten his mail for
a few days, and his mail spool file was growing to 40 or 50 MB - tarring
that every hour was getting to be really noticable on our ancient hardware,
and of course highly redundant).  I noticed that in your script, you used
"&" to put the tar operation in the background - I should have done that to
help with performance.  But anyway, I have changed to a different solution
altogether for incoming mail (the most critical as well as largest part of
what I was trying to capture), and stopped getting the log files every hour
(in the middle of the night I have yet to get an error about changing
files!).  But your example script taught me some tricks I can use for other
things, and it is possible that in the future we will go back to getting
logs more often.  Thanks everyone.

Karen