Question

Having issues with compressing folders via tar on shell backup script.

# Path to backup directories
DIRS="/home/bob /var/www /root"

# Store todays date
NOW=$(date +"%F")

# Store backup path
BACKUP="/backup"
BACKUPDIR="$BACKUP/daily/calendar/$NOW"

# Backup file name hostname.time.tar.gz 
BFILE="dirs.tar.gz"

$TAR -zcvf ${BACKUPDIR}/${BFILE} "${DIRS}"
echo  $TAR -zcvf ${BACKUPDIR}/${BFILE} "${DIRS}"

The error I keep getting is

/bin/tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
/bin/tar: /home/bob /var/www /root: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
/bin/tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
/bin/tar -zcvf /backup/daily/calendar/2012-12-13/dirs.tar.gz /home/bob /var/www /root

If i run the last echo command on terminal, it works ok. Does not work when called within the script

Answer 1

Try to remove the double quotes:

$TAR -zcvf ${BACKUPDIR}/${BFILE} ${DIRS}