shtool-tarball - GNU shtool command for rolling standardized tarballs
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 ...]
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.
The following command line options are available.
Display some processing information.
Enable the output of the essential shell commands which are executed.
Output tarball to file tarball.
Pipe resulting tarball through compression program prog.
Sets the top-level directory into which the tarball unpacks. By default it is tarball without the trailing .tar.* extension.
The user (owner) of files and directories in the tarball to user.
The group of files and directories in the tarball to group.
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]\$".
# 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 .
The GNU shtool tarball command was originally written by Ralf S. Engelschall <rse@engelschall.com> in 1999 for GNU shtool.