[vox-tech] Question about Tar

[Richard Crawford]

I've been trying to create a tar file which contains everything in our
website except files in subdirectories called "message".

First, I created an exclude file this way:

# find . -type f -print | egrep 'message*' > dlcmessages

When I cat the dlcmessages file, I see all of the message files, so I
assume it assembled the file properly.

Now, I'm trying to run the tar command.  I've used this:

# tar -cvf dlctar.tar --exclude-file=dlcmessages .

It starts the process without any hiccups, but it doesn't appear to
exclude the message files that I want to have excluded.

I've also tried

# tar -cvfX dlctar.tar exclude .

with no success.

According to the documentation I've read, including man tar, this *should*
work, but it isn't.  What am I doing wrong?