Hi List, hope this is not too offtopic, but this bothers me and my backup. My backups are tar jobs in cron, eg: 20 23 * * * tar -zcf /mnt/backupInternalHosts/backup/backup.tar.gz /etc /root /home && touch /tmp/state_backup-backup This always sends me an unwanted email with: tar: Removing leading `/' from member names I consider this a bug because this informal message is printed to error out? Ok, I rewrite my tar job to get around this: tar -zc -f /mnt/backupInternalHosts/backup/backup.tar.gz -C / etc root home && touch /tmp/state_backup-backup Fine this works, but problems arise when I try to exclude things (example under /tmp/foo): $ mkdir dir1 dir2 dir1/dir2 $ touch dir1/dir2/importantFile $ tar -cvf tarfile.tar --exclude=dir2 -C /tmp/foo/ dir1 dir2 dir1/ Because the exclude pattern matches under dir1 my important File is not backed up. The problem is, I cannot specify the exclude pattern to match only /tmp/foo/dir2 , can I? Thx Rainer