Crisis Averted!

In preparing the recent releases of Jabber::Bot, I had my first OS X experience with using tar to produce a tarball; I had previously only been a consumer of tarballs, at least in OS X.

Using OS X on the command line means dealing with resource forks. Especially when doing things like copying or archiving files for public distribution. Of course, most OS X folks are familiar with .DS_STORE files. They are a nuisance, but generally can be dealt with without much fuss. Resource forks, on the other hand, can be a whole different animal.

Which brings me to my point. In order to create a public tarball, it's a good idea to exclude resource forks. They serve no purpose to anyone but you or another OS X user, who likely doesn't really care anyway. But, tar on OS X (Tiger) likely won't exclude them, even if you specify a proper exclude pattern. Like, say, --exclude='._*'. It took a few attempts, but I finally was able to prod all-knowing Google for a solution. On the command line (that's Terminal, folks):

export COPY_EXTENDED_ATTRIBUTES_DISABLE=true

Then, run tar as you normally would. Maybe tar -cf foo.tar ./foo, or so? Yeah, now you're talking.