Hi John, You might get some value from creating a verbose listing from each tarball, dump to file, sort so they are in the same order, and then compare the two files. "tar -tzf ..." lists the files in the tarball, add v to it for the verbose listing with date and size and maybe more. Rob -- Rob Echlin, B. Eng. 613-266-8311 - Ottawa, ON http://talksoftware.wordpress.com/ ----- Original Message ----- > From: John C Nash <nashjc [ at ] uottawa [ dot ] ca> > To: Rick <graham [ dot ] rick [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com> > Cc: linux <linux [ at ] lists [ dot ] oclug [ dot ] on [ dot ] ca> > Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2011 1:04:19 PM > Subject: Re: [OCLUG-Tech] tarball differences > >T hanks. That makes sense. > > Best, JN > > > On 08/31/2011 12:51 PM, Rick wrote: >> According to the spec that bite is the first byte of the modification >> time field. >> >> -- >> MTIME (Modification TIME) >> This gives the most recent modification time of the original file >> being compressed. The time is in Unix format, i.e., seconds since >> 00:00:00 GMT, Jan. 1, 1970. (Note that this may cause problems for >> MS-DOS and other systems that use local rather than Universal time.) >> If the compressed data did not come from a file, MTIME is set to the >> time at which compression started. MTIME = 0 means no time stamp is >> available. >> -- >> >> see: http://www.gzip.org/zlib/rfc-gzip.html#file-format >> >> On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 12:35 PM, John C Nash <nashjc [ at ] uottawa [ dot ] ca> > wrote: >>> In preparing a backup script for my server, I wanted to tar a > directory, e.g., >>> >>> tar czvf mydir.tar.gz /path-to-mydir/ >>> >>> and compare it with the "last" versions e.g., > last/mydir.tar.gz >>> >>> Even when no changes made, if I do >>> >>> cmp mydir.tar.gz last/mydir.tar.gz >>> >>> I get >>> >>> mydir.tar.gz last/mydir.tar.gz differ: byte 5, line 1 >>> >>> This doesn't happen with zip, so I have a "sort of" > workaround. However, I'm curious to >>> the origin of the issue if anyone has ideas. >>> >>> Cheers, >>> >>> JN >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Linux mailing list >>> Linux [ at ] lists [ dot ] oclug [ dot ] on [ dot ] ca >>> http://oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/linux >>> >> >> >> > _______________________________________________ > Linux mailing list > Linux [ at ] lists [ dot ] oclug [ dot ] on [ dot ] ca > http://oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/linux >