tar cvf backupfile.tar .[a-zA-Z0-9]*Any better ideas? This command requires that the dot is followed by an alphanumerical character. Which is usually the case for the hidden files in the user's home folder.
The .0 to .1 update suggests, that it's not a big deal. In fact, it is. Many things do brake and most people advise to do a clean install of 9.1. Because of extensive third party installations and customization I wanted to upgrade. In case the upgrade appeared unusable, I wanted to have the possibility to go back to 9.0. This appeared easily possible because we had a free 8.6 GB partition (hdb3) on the harddisk. Actually it was not free, but it was the root partition of our RedHat 9 installation. I did the following things:
Sometimes you cannot kill some processes via the regular command kill -9 PID When you list them with ps -aux you will see the entry defunct Those defunct processes are apparently still hanging around mostly because their parent application is waiting for them to receive something. These processes are already dead, that's why they are called "zombies". In order to kill them, you have to kill the parent application first. You can figure out what the parent's PID is by issuing pstree PID