NAME

       shtool-tarball - GNU shtool command for rolling standardized tarballs

SYNOPSIS

       shtool tarball [-t|--trace] [-v|--verbose] [-o|--output tarball] [-c|--compress prog] [-d|--directory
       directory] [-u|--user user] [-g|--group group] [-e|--exclude pattern] path [path ...]

DESCRIPTION

       This command is for rolling input files under path into a distribution tarballs which can be extracted by
       tar(1).

       The four important aspects of good open source software tarballs are: (1) unpack into a single top-level
       directory, (2) top-level directory corresponds to the tarball filename, (3) tarball files should be
       sorted and (4) arbitrary names for file owner and group.

OPTIONS

       The following command line options are available.

       -v, --verbose
           Display some processing information.

       -t, --trace
           Enable the output of the essential shell commands which are executed.

       -o, --output tarball
           Output tarball to file tarball.

       -c, --compress prog
           Pipe resulting tarball through compression program prog.

       -d, --directory directory
           Sets  the  top-level  directory into which the tarball unpacks.  By default it is tarball without the
           trailing ".tar.*" extension.

       -u, --user user
           The user (owner) of files and directories in the tarball to user.

       -g, --group group
           The group of files and directories in the tarball to group.

       -e, --exclude pattern
           Exclude files and directories matching comma-separated  list  of  regex  pattern  from  the  tarball.
           Directories   are  expanded  before  the  filtering  takes  place.  The  default  filter  pattern  is
           ""CVS,\\.cvsignore,\\.svn,\\.[oa]\$"".

EXAMPLE

        #   Makefile.in
        dist:
            ...
            V=`shtool version -d short ...`; \
            shtool tarball -o foobar-$$V.tar.gz -c 'gzip -9' \
                           -u bar -g gnu -e 'CVS,\.cvsignore' .

HISTORY

       The GNU shtool tarball command was originally written by Ralf S.   Engelschall  <rse@engelschall.com>  in
       1999 for GNU shtool.

SEE ALSO

       shtool(1), tar(1), compress(1).

18-Jul-2008                                       shtool 2.0.8                             SHTOOL-TARBALL.TMP(1)