Ask Ein

Using tar to archive only newer files

Q: We sometimes have multiple people updating project directories and we would like to be able to periodically make an archive of files which have changed so we can update other places where rsync isn't feasible to use. How can we do this?

A: You should be able to combine options for both the tar and find utilities into one line to produce the desired archive.

Examples:
Tar archive with gzip compression
tar -czf /tmp/myArchive.tgz `find . -newer /path/to/file/to/compare -type f -print`

Regular tar archive
tar -cf /tmp/myArchive.tar `find . -newer /path/to/file/to/compare -type f -print`

Discussion:
If we omitted the "-type f", any directories which contained modified files would also appear in the list, causing tar to add that entire directory. This is not the behaviour we want, so we tell the find utility to restrict its choices to regular files only.

Removing Acrobat Toolbars from Microsoft Office

Q: When Microsoft Office products and Acrobat Professional are installed, Acrobat adds a PDF toolbar to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. How do I remove this unwanted Acrobat toolbar?

A: You should be able to permanently turn it off by customizing which toolbars are displayed. However, the Acrobat toolbar seems to happily ignore that. Instead, you need to remove some troublesome configuration files.

1. Locate Microsoft Office folder on your computer. It's probably in the Applications folder. If you don't have the full Office, just find either Excel or Word's folder.

2. Use the find facility inside that folder to locate PDFMaker.dot and PDFMaker.xla files. These are the troublesome files.

3. Delete the .dot and .xla files from the previous step.

4. When Adobe Acrobat asks you to repair PDFMaker, Just say "No" to repairing it.

I think I first saw this on MacFixIt, but it's briefly described in a MacWorld article as well.

Update November 15, 2005: If you're having trouble in Tiger locating the troublesome files, in my copy of Office, they're in Office/Startup/Excel and Office/Startup/Word. "Office" is a folder in the main Microsoft Office folder in your Applications directory, i.e. in the same folder where you see the icons for Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, if you have a full Microsoft Office installation. Note that applying Microsoft Office software patches often "fixes" the PDF toolbar and brings it back.