Using the tar --acls option to prevent the loss of ACLs during a backup

If you ever need to use tar to create a backup of either a file or a directory that has ACLs assigned to it, you'll need to include the --acls option switch. Otherwise, the ACLs will be lost. To show this, I'll create a backup of the perm_demo_dir directory without the --acls option. First, note that I do have ACLs on files in this directory, as indicated by the + sign on the last two files:

[donnie@localhost ~]$ cd perm_demo_dir
[donnie@localhost perm_demo_dir]$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-rw-r--. 1 donnie accounting 0 Nov  5 20:17 file1.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 donnie accounting 0 Nov  5 20:17 file2.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 donnie accounting 0 Nov  5 20:17 file3.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 donnie accounting 0 Nov  5 20:17 file4.txt
-rw-rw----+ 1 donnie donnie     0 Nov  9 15:19 frank_file.txt
-rw-rw----+ 1 donnie donnie     0 Nov 12 12:29 new_file.txt
[donnie@localhost perm_demo_dir]$

Now, I'll do the backup without the --acls:

[donnie@localhost perm_demo_dir...