Because tar on HP-UX is broken, we have been forced to implement our own work around. Normally, on Solaris at least, you can supply tar with an exclude file. Thus allowing you to avoid tarring up mp3s or your collections of GTK+ themes and backgrounds or what have you.

I wanted to include this functionality in the script because you never can tell when some one is going to pass the script along to a friend but not tell them how to use it properly. Nor did I want to have to hardcode the name of the script since file names can change.