Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc

I think I've found the answer to my own question. It appears that I had extra whitespace in the form of newlines at the end of my exclude files. Apparently, tar interprets this as meaning that all files should be excluded. In any case, I took out the extra whitespace, and it's working fine now.

>I'm trying to use tar to back up the home directories of my users.  I
>use the following command
>
>tar -cvf user.tar -X user.exclude /home/user
>
>where user.exclude contains the following
>
>/home/user/.gnome/*
>/home/user/.kde/*
>
>etc.
>
>When I run the tar command, it doesn't back up anything in the user's
>home directory.