I’m always confused with the use of ‘exclude’ options with ‘tar’. Here I’m sharing a few tips I found online, just in case it might help you. The meanings of –exclude and –exclude-from are always confusing:

• Use –exclude when files to be excluded are given as a pattern on the command line.
• Use –exclude-from to introduce the name of a file which contains a list of patterns, one per line; each of these patterns can exclude zero, one, or many files.

When using –exclude=pattern, be sure to quote the pattern parameter, so GNU tar sees wildcard characters like ‘*’.

For example, write:

$ tar -c -f <em>archive.tar</em> --exclude '*.o' <em>directory</em>

tar does not act on a path name explicitly listed on the command line if one of its file name components is excluded. If files that end with ‘*.o’ are excluded when creating an archive, but explicitly name the file ‘dir.o/foo’ after all the options have been listed, ‘dir.o/foo’ will be excluded from the archive.
Only shell syntax, or globbing will work with exclude options in tar. The command might fail if regexp syntax is used to describe files to be excluded in the command.

Reference:

• GNU tar User Guide – problems with exclude

GeoCities has been an important platform for personal web sites since the early days of Web. With the recent news from Yahoo that GeoCities is going to be discontinued on October 26, 2009, the Internet Archive, a nonprofit founded to build an Internet library and archive the public Web, is working over the next few months to ensure their collection of GeoCities sites is as deep and thorough as possible.

We can help in this effort by suggesting know Goecities sites, which are no more maintained, but have useful content of value or even your own historical Geocities page!

See details or submit your site for indexing!

“Now I’ve landed in blogger. We’ll see what happens in the future.”

This is what I wrote exactly 3 years back, when I started this blog. And its surprising even to me, I’m still hanging around this blog. Though I haven’t been writing often or interesting in this, there were few posts in the total of 120+ posts, that would have benefited someone. Also thanks to the friends who have linked back to this blog, and for the few comments to some of the posts.

For the 4th year, I have nothing special, it will be as normal as before…!

Problem (I had): Wanted to run a VirtualBox on a RHEL 4.7 Linux server which is shared by someothers. But as some other processes took more CPU, the VirtualBox performance was bad. So I wanted to increase the priority given to VirtualBox.

Solution (I found): VirtualBox can be given higher priority using nice command. Also renice command can be used to change the priority of a running process, which will also be useful.

nice -10 VBoxHeadless

Gives the VBoxHeadless process 1.5 times priority than the normal process, calculated as (20 – -10)/20 = 1.5

nice -20 make

Executes make at maximum priority.

renice +20 2222

Changes the priority of process 2222 to +20 (minimum priority).

renice -10 -p 13013

Changes the priority of a running process by specifying its process ID, where priority can be,

• 1 to 20 : Runs the specified processes slower than the base priority.
• 0 : Sets priority of the specified processes to the base scheduling priority.
• -20 to -1 : Runs the specified processes quicker than the base priority.

References and further reading:

• nice (Unix)
• Linux Command Directory: nice
• Linux Command Directory: renice

A simple short film about communication. ‘Signs’ tells the beautiful story between a man and a woman who communicated to each other in opposing office blocks by holding up simple signs, they never talked.

Created by Publicis Mojo and @RadicalMedia. Directed by Patrick Hughes

One of the 2009 Cannes Lions winners! More info

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