How To:Ignore spurious messages from GNU Tar

This article is a part of the How Tos collection.

amgtar can be used as the backup application in Amanda 2.6.1 and later releases. amgtar is an Application API plugin that uses GNU tar to do backup and recovery. This application provides properties to treat GNU tar messages as success or warning or errors. In case of warnings, the backup run will be marked as "strange".

Configuration

The application amgtar properties are defined in application-tool section in amanda.conf(5). In the following example, amgtar will ignore all that has regular expression "file changed as we read it$". These messages are not mentioned in the amreport(8) output and the backup will be considered as success. See How To:Use Amanda Applications on a Client for a more general description of configuring Amanda applications.

        define application-tool  app_amgtar {
                plugin                      "amgtar"
                comment                     "amgtar"
                property append "ignore" "file changed as we read it$"
        }
        define dumptype gtar_dump {
               program "APPLICATION"
               application "app_amgtar"
        }
Use dumptype "gtar_dump" in disklist file.

Alternatively, you can mention it directly in disklist file.

         application {
                plugin                      "amgtar"
                comment                     "amgtar"
                property append "ignore" "file changed as we read it$"
        }

You can use specify "strange" and "normal" messages as properties for amgtar application.