star and /dev/watchdog (exclusion of files)

Hi,

some time ago (I don't remember the version of star I was using back
then) I stumbled over an issue regarding the exclusion of files from
being backed up by star.

I am using the following command line arguments to exclude files from
the backup:

	-not pattern='^/some/path/here/{%!/*}'

This excludes everything *beyond* /some/path/here (the path itself
is being backed up, but empty).

So far, so good. Back then I tried this to exclude /dev/* like this:

	-not pattern='^/dev/{%!/*}'

The problem with this was that star did in some way fiddle with the
files beyond /dev/ -- the watchdog came alive because star somehow
touched/opened it and thus it resetted the machine after the
write-timeout expired (no write to the watchdog device after N
seconds) :(
Is there a way to *safely* exclude everything *beyond* a given
directory but not the directory itself? By 'safely' I mean making
star NOT touch anything beyond at all.

Thanks!
-- 
Regards,
Wolfram Schlich <[email protected]>
Gentoo Linux * http://dev.gentoo.org/~wschlich/