tar argument -F

[Chris Vail]

It appears that the HPUX version of tar does not support the -F command as does Solaris and most of the other unixes with which I am familiar. In these the command:
tar cvfF /tmp/tarfile /tmp/filelist
would take a list of files to back up from the file /tmp/filelist and write them into /tmp/tarfile.

Without this argument, exactly how is one supposed to use tar to back up a BUNCH of files, save typing them in on a very, very long command line?

What alternatives are there?

[Sridhar Bhaskarla · Accepted solution]

Hi Chris,

It's easy. If /tmp/filelist has all the files listed, then you can use the command

tar cvf /tmp/tarfile `cat /tmp/filelist`

to backup all the files in /tmp/filelist.

-Sri