I'm doing an incremental backup system using Perl and TAR.

I spider the directories, checking and comparing mtime and size against recorded database entries, updating and adding as necessary. Then I generate a list of files to process through TAR.

I have run up against a problem with TAR itself, I know this isn't strictly a Perl question, but maybe some unix guru has some suggestions.

I will issue this system command :-

tar -c -P -T ListOfFiles.txt -f MyTarFile.tar

where ListOfFiles.txt contains the following entries, delimited by usual chr(10) :-

File1.jpg
File2.gif
File3'Hello.txt

When TAR is running, he is adding in an escape character to the third file, then of course reporting an error as he can't find the file on the disk.

File3\'Hello.txt

So how to avoid TAR doing this escaping ?

Thanks for any suggestions,

Dave