I've done this, and it may become intractable... It will work, one line at a 
time, no quotes and no spaces in the dir name. Quoting the whole filespec tar 
says it can't find it, but the error message looks like it parsed it right. 
Quoting just the variable, as in "%1" in the bat file passes the quotes to tar, 
and no quotes fails on dirs with spaces such as Program Files. Blasted Microsoft!!

Quoting the name with spaces and passing it to a batch file with %1 as 
variable, with no quotes in the line, picks up the first " and the first word 
of the name only, and no " on the bat command line only passes the first word...

Using tar on just a command line, no quotes around Program Files looks for just 
d:\program and with quotes it fails, but the message looks correctly interpreted...

The backup media are FAT32 (easier to go cross-system) and is the way they 
come. One loses a lot of space in the MFT if you have just a few large files 
with NTFS, and then there's the older systems... FAT32 is just the best common 
denominator. That means, no native compression, and some of these tar files 
drop to half size when gzipped (default level too). There is also the 4GB file 
size limit, so splitting may be necessary. I would anyway, at 4GB, so I could 
do longer term copies to DVD as time permits, so there really isn't any loss in 
making that a requirement.

It sure would be nice to tar or zip each folder on the disk, then combine them 
into a zip of the top folder (so each top level dir is zipped into its own 
file), all automatically for each machine it's run on, and splitting any 
particular zip file over x MB. I can't be the first guy to want to do this... :-O



Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
> Dr Skip wrote:
> 
> 
> What helps often with this is creating little batch files, in this case for
> the command that is run by the for or forfiles loop, and/or around tar,
> gzip and the like. This gives you more freedom to massage the action and
> the input to the executables. For example, you can not call gzip if the
> directory is the recycle bin and possibly avoid the "bombing".
> 
> 
> It's a bit ugly to access the file system, but I didn't find it difficult
> when starting from an example.
> 
> Another possibility is to use an evaluation copy of the 4nt shell; I found
> that many things that don't work well in cmd.exe do work there.
> 
> And still another question is why you need the files ziped... maybe another
> option gives you what you need; like for example using NTFS compression on
> the backup drive, since you're working on WinXP.
> 
> Gerhard
> 
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