I am working on a server admin script, and am trying to automate backups of my world directories on regular intervals. I know the commands save-off and save-all are what I should be doing to flush the current state to disk before creating my backup. However, I am getting some unexpected behavior I believe is a bug.

My backup-process is basically this:

1. issue save-all command, wait for "Saved the world" to be output by server
2. issue save-off command, wait for "Turned off world auto-saving" to be output by server
3. Create a tar.gz archive via tar czf "/path/to/backup.tar.gz" . (with the server dir as the cwd)
4. issue save-on command, wait for "Turned on world auto-saving" to be output by server

Currently, I have to add a 5 second delay between steps 2 and 3 because otherwise, my tar command will always fail because files within the directory are modified during the attempt at creating the tar file.

Something in the server output is misleading, my suspicion is either save-all or save-off is reporting completion incorrectly, or perhaps I am not approaching this backup process correctly.