topic Re: tar help in Operating System - HP-UX

tar help

Randy_121 — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 15:43:07 GMT

Here is the scenario:

A tar file (of /opt) was coptied from one system to another.

I want to untar this file to a directory say /tmp/opt instead of overwriting my /opt directory.

Can this be done?
What is the syntax I can use?

Thank you,

Randy

Re: tar help

A. Clay Stephenson — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 15:53:39 GMT

In general, backups with absolute pathnames are less than wise. With tar, unless you do some tricky chroot's, you are stuck. However, you can use the pax command (which understands tar, cpio, and pax formats) to restore the files with different pathnames. Man pax for details and pay attention to the -s option.

Re: tar help

Rick Garland — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 15:54:52 GMT

How was this tar created - with absolute path or relative path?

Relative path, you were in the /opt directory and issued the tar command.
tar -cvf mytarball.tar *

In this case, you can go into the /tmp/opt directory and do the 'tar -xvf mytarball.tar'

If absolute path, you issued the tar command as such;
'tar -cvf /opt'

In this case, doing an un-tar will overwrite the /opt directory, not a wise idea. Doesn't matter what the CWD is.

If you have an absolute tarball, you can use the 'pax' utility

Re: tar help

Ivan Ferreira — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 16:00:54 GMT

I don't have HP-UX to test but some tar implementations have an option to strip the initial / from the file names when restoring.

In Tru64 is "s" option. If you don't have that option, you should create the tarfile using relative path.

cd /opt
tar cvf /backup/tarfile ./*

Re: tar help

Muthukumar_5 — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 01:57:49 GMT

You are having absolute path from / directory. You can do like that.

# tar -tvf

You can get details. If it is absolute then move /opt contents related with tarfile with .old notation.

Extract contents and then move it to /tmp/opt. You can not move with tar to all files.

hth.

Re: tar help

KVK — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 02:07:08 GMT

U can follow the TAR to restore the contents from othere server to where u want to restore .

I had experiance of restoring the /usr directory from one server to other server where /usr tampered .

I suggest you to restore it in /tmp location then check the file permissions are Ok .. If it's OK

Proceed to do a TAR in absolute path