> Just to clarify, the above example would fail for because of the -l option > passed to ls. You want just the file names, not the additional info that a > long listing provides. > > $ tar cvf output_file.tar `ls -da [^A-Z]* | grep -v /path/to/file/to/skip` > Without the -l, aren't the basenames of filenames outputted from the backtick interpreted as being in the cwd?