Fellow monks,

To my shocking surprise, two days ago I found out that the the infamous Linux DrakTools backup utility was not actually backing everything up. I had set it up to do the backup of all of my data, and, even though the report said every file was backed up, the resulting tar.gz ball did not contain the file that I wanted to restore. (There was MANY such files and entire directories missing). This gave me great concern, so I search around for a comparable backup utility, but didn't find one to my linking. So, since this type of a job is perfect for perl, I adapted a few scripts I found here to be more to my liking. My results are seen below.

Unfortunately, I have two problems:
1. Aparently, Archive::Tar keeps the tar image in memory, which causes my script to die with "Out of memory!" error when my 1G of RAM and 2G of swap get completely filled. I searched, but could not find a way to flush the in-memory archive to the disk. Did I miss something? Is there a better way to create a tar image without using all that memory?
2. I wanted to find out why I was getting the "Out of memory!" error message, so I thought that 

eval { Carp::confess("init") };
$SIG{__DIE__ } = sub { Carp::confess };

[download]

should do the equivalent of a stack trace dump before exiting. Apparently it is not doing that. What am I missing?

Thanks in advance,
Fellow monk 

=head1 NAME

backup.pl - Yet Another Script for making backups

=head1 SYNOPSIS

backup.pl --bakdir=s --backup=s [--ignorefile=s] [--debug=i]

Options:

    --bakdir     - where to look for and store backup files
    --backup     - what directory to backup
    --ignorefile - file which lists what subdirs not to backup
    --debug      - print debug information

=cut

use strict;
use warnings;
use English;
use Getopt::Long;
use Pod::Usage;
use Archive::Tar;
use File::Path;
use File::Find;
use File::Glob ':glob';
use Carp ( );

eval { Carp::confess("init") };
$SIG{__DIE__ } = sub { Carp::confess };

my $debug = 0;
my $bakdir = '';
my $backup = '';
my $ignorefile = '';

GetOptions(
   'debug=i'      => \$debug,
   'bakdir=s'     => \$bakdir,
   'backup=s'     => \$backup,
   'ignorefile=s' => \$ignorefile,
);

eval {mkpath($bakdir)};
if ($@) {
   warn "Unable to find or create directory $bakdir\n$@\n";
   pod2usage(1);
   exit;
}

# process the ignore file list
my @ignorelist;
if ($ignorefile ne '') {
   open(IGN, $ignorefile) || die "Unable to open $ignorefile for readi
+ng: $!\n";
   while (<IGN>) {
      chomp;
      my @globlist = bsd_glob($_, GLOB_TILDE | GLOB_ERR);
      if (GLOB_ERROR) {
         warn "ignorefile entry '$_' produced and error!\n";
      }
      foreach (@globlist) {
         push @ignorelist, $_;
      }
   }
   close(IGN);
}

# create a tar.gz archive with a unique filename
my @t = reverse((localtime)[0..5]); $t[0]+=1900; $t[1]++;     
my $newbackup = $bakdir.'/'.sprintf("%4u-%02u-%02u-%02u-%02u-%02u",@t)
+.'.tar.gz';
my $tar = Archive::Tar->new();
find({ wanted => \&add_to_archive, follow=>1, follow_skip=>2, no_chdir
+=>1}, $backup);
$tar->write($newbackup, 9);

sub add_to_archive {
   my $ignore = 0;
   foreach my $ignoreentry (@ignorelist) {
      if ($File::Find::name eq $ignoreentry) {
         print "IGNORED == match!!!  " if ($debug >= 1);
         $ignore++;
      }
      if ($File::Find::name =~ /^$ignoreentry\//) {
         print "IGNORED dir match!!! " if ($debug >= 1);
         $ignore++;
         $File::Find::prune = 1;
      }
   }

   print "Added                " if (!$ignore && ($debug >= 1));
   print "$File::Find::name\n" if ($debug >= 1);
   return if $ignore;
   $tar->add_files($File::Find::name);
}

[download]

In reply to backup script runs out of memory by gri6507

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