On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 07:50:50PM -0700, Mike Bird wrote: > On Tue, 2005-06-07 at 17:58, Jesse Keating wrote: > > Oh wait, I bet a sysadmin knows that she/he can't backup stuff in > > the /dev/ tree, > > Wrong. "tar cfv /tmp/dev.tar /dev" "tar cfvz /tmp/dev/tgz /dev" This is GNU tar saving your hide. You will try that with some other version of tar and you may be for a nasty surprise. In particular if you happen to have something like /dev/kmem. :-) That is why some "old hands" may prefer cpio although this may have some other problems. OTOH with cpio you may make a sparse file from something which merely has lots of null characters. Michal