The man page for tar uses the word "dump" and its forms several times. What does it mean? For example (manual page for tar 1.26):
"-h, --dereference
follow symlinks; archive and dump the files they point to"
Many popular systems have a "trash can" or "recycle bin." I don't want the files dumped there, but it kind of sounds that way.
At present, I don't want tar to write or delete any file, except that I want tar to create or update a single tarball.
FYI, the man page for the tar installed on the system I am using at the moment is a lot shorter than what appears to be the current version. And the description of -h, --dereference there seems very different to me:
"When reading or writing a file to be archived, tar accesses the file that a symbolic link points to, rather than the symlink itself. See section Symbolic Links."
P.S. I could not get "block quote" to work properly in this post.
File system backups are also called dumps.
—@raymond-chen, quoting GNU tar manual