Very Computer

: I'm looking for some suggestions with this bug.  If I backup up my
: machine with 'tar cvfz /dev/ftape /' while X11R6 is running, the
: entire machine hangs forever as soon as tar encounters the file
: '/proc/kcore'.  This problem does not happen if X11R6 is not running.
: Nor did the problem happen before upgrading to the Slackware 3.0
: kernels.  Does anyone happen to have any ideas about this bug?

You should not backup /proc since it's just info about the current state of
the computer (anyway, restoring it might prove disastrous).  /dev/kproc is
probably the kernel memory, you certainly don't want to write there during
restore :-)

Jakob

--
Jakob Schiotz              !  Fax:    +1 (314) 935 6219
Department of Physics      !  Phone:  +1 (314) 935 4968

St. Louis, MO 63130, USA   !  WWW:    http://nils.wustl.edu/schiotz.html

Yes, BUT...  What is a good way of NOT backing up /proc with Gtar?  Since
exclude does not function, I have been unable to easily pick and choose
what to copy and what not short of having find make me a list of explicit
files.  Thankfully I have not yet had to do a complete restore so I am not
really sure of the consquences of having saved /proc.  But I suspect that
this is really a read only thingie, though I am not really sure.  I HAVE
found that while I can generally cat /proc/*, I can not get at it with
emacs.  But I have been too busy learning a million and one other things
about my new toy (Linux) to follow this one through.

Harvey

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 Harvey Fishman   |   It is easy to live by the laws that you agree with.

  718-258-7276    |        even the ones that you think are wrong.