Restoring the entire contents of a tape created using TAR

[Andre Lemon]

I have a request to recover the contents of a
tape from a programmer that was created by another company using Tar, i can do it but i
would like to know of a better way, i am a new
HP-UX jr. admin.

I used tar -tf tape-device to get the contents
of the tape and got 20 files listed.

I then used tar -xvf tape-device -voi ./cht*
17 of the files started with this, however
only 4 were restored, the intertesting thing is that not the 1st 4 files but it did the files in a radom manner.

If i use tar -xvf tape-device -voi filename
for each indivual file on the tape it loads them all.

I am trying to learn....

I tried to create a file that contains the list
of each file on that tape and tried the following without luck

tar -xvf tape-device -voI loadlist
&
tar -xvf tape-device -voi -I loadlist

and nothing was loaded.

Am i doing something wrong?, please share your
wisdom and i will be thankful and will of course award points.

I will check back on monday, I am now going to
get back to the conversion from one EMC box to
another on our HP3000 MPE/ix systems..

Thanks

Andre'

[PIYUSH D. PATEL · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I normally used to view the contents of the tape thro

#tar -tvf /dev/rmt/0m

If the contents of the tape shows the filename in the following format (relative path )
./datafile then you can restore the files anywhere you like ie. go to a particular directory where you want to restore /temp and then give
#tar -xvf /dev/rmt/0m
and your file will be restored as /tmp/datafile

If you have the files listed as
/datafile then it will get restored as /datafile only

You can also restore specific files by

#tar -xvf /dev/rmt/0m ./*.xls
#tar -xvf /dev/rmt/0m .

Piyush

[Mike Hassell]

Andre,

Looks like your trying to to overdue it a bit with your syntax. Here are some examples, so you can better understand tar syntax (note that the hyphen is not required):

tar tvf /dev/rmt/0m ; display the table of contents (t) from /dev/rmt/0m and produce verbose (v) output.

tar xvf /dev/rmt/0m ;
extract (x) the entire contents of the archive on tape /dev/rmt/0m to default destination.

tar xvf /dev/rmt/0m file ; extract (x) only file from the archive on tape /dev/rmt/0m to default destination.

Be sure to take a minute to review the man pages on tar as well as they will provide more detailed syntax:

man tar

Hope that helps.

-Mike

[Tim D Fulford]

the above commands look ok if you drop the -voi bit

BE CAREFUL that the tar is not an absolute (i.e. /home/progs/...) if this is the case tar will restore them to exactly that path. If this is the case you will need to use pax to restore them relatively.

Tim

[Arockia Jegan]

As Tim mentioned be careful when you untar the data if you created the tar file by using absolute path and don't want to overwrite the existing directories/files.

You can use GNU tar if you want to untar the files at your preferred directory.

Find the GNU tar utility here,

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Gnu/tar-1.13.25/

[Frank Slootweg]

Re the ./cht* part: If you use wild-card characters, i.e. in this case the star (*), you will have to escape them.

Why? Because if you don't, the *shell* will expand the pattern and only the *resulting* file names, i.e. the ones which *are* already on disk, will be passed to tar and extracted.

How? By putting the pattern bewteen normal single quotes, i.e.

'./cht*'

[Andre Lemon]

Thanks to you all, the answers provided helped,
i laughed at how simple it turned out to be.

I used tar -xvf $TWP_TAPE1 (our tape-device)

and all the files loaded, so i see that i was
making it harder than it needed to be. Thanks
again and i will add this to my lessons learned
about HP-UX.


Andre'