NAME

       shtool-tarball - GNU shtool command for rolling standardized tarballs

SYNOPSIS

       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 ...]

DESCRIPTION

       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.

OPTIONS

       The following command line options are available.

       -v, --verbose
           Display some processing information.

       -t, --trace
           Enable the output of the essential shell commands which are executed.

       -o, --output tarball
           Output tarball to file tarball.

       -c, --compress prog
           Pipe resulting tarball through compression program prog.

       -d, --directory directory
           Sets the top-level directory into which the tarball unpacks.  By default it is tarball
           without the trailing ".tar.*" extension.

       -u, --user user
           The user (owner) of files and directories in the tarball to user.

       -g, --group group
           The group of files and directories in the tarball to group.

       -e, --exclude pattern
           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]\$"".

EXAMPLE

        #   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' .

HISTORY

       The GNU shtool tarball command was originally written by Ralf S.  Engelschall
       <rse@engelschall.com> in 1999 for GNU shtool.

SEE ALSO

       shtool(1), tar(1), compress(1).