Monthly Archive: January 2009

To create a tar file containing only a dir structure in GNU/Linux, this seems to work nicely:

tar -cvf filename.tar --after-date YYMMDD *

Where YYMMDD is a date newer than all files in the dir(s) being tarred up. Picking a date in the future should do the job. Tar will include all the directories and none of the files.

(That same behavior is the reason I went to the trouble of creating a cpafter program to copy files created after a certain date — I didn’t want all those empty dirs included.)

Scott Burns writes:

Train yourself in self-reliance. Most Americans would be endangered if they lost their income for a month, their electricity for a week or their access to a supermarket or gas station for a few days. We rediscover this in every major snowstorm or hurricane. We simply don’t think about sustaining ourselves in our homes in the event of utility failures or worse.

It’s time we did.

Oh, I think about it. I’ve lived in Minnesota my whole life and these past few years I think a lot more about what would happen if we lost power or gas for an extended time in subzero temperatures. With the prospect of an aging infrastructure and little money for proper maintenance, I worry about “service interruptions.”

But how far should I go? Should I get a small generator? Kerosene burners? A whole-house generator?

Maybe I should start by picking up one of the books that Burns recommends:

Just in Case: How to Be Self-Sufficient When the Unexpected Happens, by Kathy Harrison. …