tar not archiving all my files

I wanted to test some potential destructive code on a directory and all its subdirectories. So, I tarballed it and then made a copy from the tarball in a space where my code wouldn't accidentally obliterate anything that I really wanted to keep. My code seemed to work except that I noticed that certain files were not put into the tarball.

This is what I originally did:


In the safe location I then did the following:


I ran a recursive diff on the archived and original directories. This showed that certain files where missing.

It seems that any file named .__<name>__ were not recorded in the archive. For example,


or


What is tar skipping over these files? How do I get tar to include them? What other files might tar not record?

Even if I ran tar in verbose mode, there was no message that things were being skipped over.

UPDATE

I installed "gnu's" version of "tar" and that works as expected. Everything is correctly archived.

So, why doesn't the natively installed "tar" do the right thing?

From man tar:
o Archive entries can have pathnames that include .. components. By default, tar will not extract files containing
.. components in their pathname.

Possibly tar will not extract dot files?

My other hidden files, "dot<name>", are all successfully copied. Only "<dot><underscore><name>" are not being copied.

Any file that begins with <dot> is a hidden file, the characters after it, underscore and all don't matter..tar will happily save them and restore them..

Can you try

That's what I'm doing. "tar" is copying all my hidden files EXCEPT
files. I'm asking why this is.

My command just lists the contents of the tarball to see if it even created it properly...I'm not on my iMac right now, but on my Linux machine I get:

$ ls -la
total 8
drwxrwxr-x 2 <me> <me> 4096 Jul 2 15:34 .
drwxrwxr-x 3 <me> <me>4096 Jul 2 15:33 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 <me> <me> 0 Jul 2 15:33 bar
-rw-rw-r-- 1 <me> <me> 0 Jul 2 15:33 foo
-rw-rw-r-- 1 <me> <me> 0 Jul 2 15:33 .foo
-rw-rw-r-- 1 <me> <me> 0 Jul 2 15:34 ._foobar_
$ cd ..
$ tar -zcf test.tar.gz test
$ tar -ztvf test.tar.gz
drwxrwxr-x <me>/<me> 0 2013-07-02 15:34 test/
-rw-rw-r-- <me>/<me> 0 2013-07-02 15:33 test/.foo
-rw-rw-r-- <me>/<me> 0 2013-07-02 15:33 test/foo
-rw-rw-r-- <me>/<me> 0 2013-07-02 15:33 test/bar
-rw-rw-r-- <me>/<me> 0 2013-07-02 15:34 test/._foobar_
$ tar -ztvf test.tar.gz | grep foobar
-rw-rw-r-- <me>/<me> 0 2013-07-02 15:34 test/._foobar_

Click to expand...

I know it works on Linux. Why not on a Mac?

I installed "gnu"'s version of "tar" and that works as expected and archives all my files.

I'm thinking maybe Apple's version is set up to not copy files with ._ so it wont copy files like ._DStore and such. I could be wrong, just thinking off the top of my head.