diff --git a/docs/manual/CoreTasks/tar.html b/docs/manual/CoreTasks/tar.html
index 663bbad48..a0b23101a 100644
--- a/docs/manual/CoreTasks/tar.html
+++ b/docs/manual/CoreTasks/tar.html
@@ -169,6 +169,13 @@ the executable files and include all others. </p>
 by one fileset. If the same file is selected by more than one fileset, it will be included in the 
 tar file twice, with the same path.</p>
 
+<p><strong>Note:</strong> The patterns in the include and exclude
+elements are considered to be relative to the corrseponding dir
+attribute as with all other filesets.  In the example above,
+<code>${dist.name}</code> is not an absolute path, but a simple name
+of a directory, so <code>${dist.name}</code> is a valid path relative
+to <code>${dist.name}/..</code>.</p>
+
 <hr>
 <p align="center">Copyright &copy; 2000,2001 Apache Software Foundation. All rights
 Reserved.</p>