. I only want the latest copy of the file in the tarball.

I think you have to delete and then add. But I also dont think that Tar is the right candidate for this job. Im guessing here of course, but perhaps gnu zip is better as it offers this type of operation directly. It doesnt compress as well as tar/zip but its much more suitable for your needs. Also, iirc Tar doesnt like Win32 paths, so you need to chdir into the directory of the file first wheras zip does the right thing.

The second part of my question is how do I supress the output of system calls to tar?

system("tar --delete --file foo.tar foo.bar >NULL: 2>&1");
[download]

But dont do that. Maybe

my $result=`tar --delete --file foo.tar foo.bar 2>&1`;
[download]

is better? Then you can least extract the error if you need to.

I also think that if your tarballs aren't large then Archive::Tar might be suitable.

---
demerphq

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.