swintall, .tar

[Victor_5]

How to install a software with .tar?

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Shawn:

Merely use the '*.tar' as the depot specification.

Regards!

...JRF...

[someone_4]

Hey shawn ..
I ran across this .. what I had to do was untar the file and it would have a dir tree. And in the new dir there was an setup file that I ran and it installed it for me. Yours might be differnt but I might be wrong but I dont know if swinstall works with tar.

Richard

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Swdepot archive will be in tar format but not all tar's are swinstallable.

You just need to untar the tar bundle. If there is any install script, run it and it will install the software for you. Specifying .tar as the depot will result in an
"I/O error".

-Sri

[linuxfan]

Hi Shawn,


Sometimes some depots have .tar extension instead of .depot, the easiest way to check if the tar file can be swinstalled is to check using swlist

swlist -s /path/to/name.tar

If it comes up with a proper listing you can use swinstall to install directly without untarring.

swinstall -s /path/to/name.tar

-HTH
Ramesh

[Victor_5]

What is the untar command for those downloaded .tar files?

[linuxfan · Accepted solution]

Hi Shawn,

Did swlist fail on the tar file?

In anycase you can use

1. to list the contents
tar tvf /path/to/name.tar

2. to untar
tar xvf /path/to/name.tar

man tar if you want to use other options

-Regards
Ramesh

[Deshpande Prashant]

HI

Try #file to see what kind of file it is.
If it's just a tar file, you can list contents using #tar -tvf
extract it using #tar -xvf

Thanks
Prashant.

[someone_4]

Try
tar xf whatever.tar
or
tar xvf /path/of/your.tar /location/of/untar

Richard

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Untar is opening the bundle.

tar xvf abc.tar

A crude way of checking whether a tar file is swinstallable or not is by doing a

tar tvf abc.tar

See if you can find a directory called "catalog" in it with an INDEX file in it.

-Sri

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Shawn:

We may be reading something into this that is not there. Are you sure that this is a swinstall bundle? It is possible that the install process is nothing more than cd to the desired install directory and then tar xvf /tmp/myfile.tar.

If swlist does not display the contents, then this is almost certainly not a swinstall bundle. Many 3rd party vendors simply have you untar in the desired place.

Regards, Clay

[someone_4]

Hi everyone.
On my post about how to untar a file I made a mistake. I said that was the way to extract a tar file and force it to a differnt directory. Well after looking I saw i was wrong! So I took it upon my self to find out of there is a way to do this. And here is what I got.

##
Depending on how the archive was created will dictate how tar extracts the
files. If a listing of the archive shows the absolute path (
/home/user/filename.txt) the files will be restored using the absolute path. If
it shows a relative path ( ./home/user/filename.txt) it will be restore relative
to the current working directory.

##
Problem Description

When restoring data how do I overwrite the pathnames stored on the tape?

I have a tape in tar format that has data stored using absolute paths.
I want to restore the data to a different location to avoid overwriting
existing files on my system. Is there a way to do this?

Solution

To do this, you can use the substitute feature of the "pax" command.
Here is an example of substituting absolute paths for relative ones:

# pax -r -s!/tmp/syscore/!./!gp -t /dev/rmt/0m

These are the options used in this example:


-r read data

-s substitute option, changes "/tmp/syscore" to "./"

g Global substitution, so every occurrence of

"/tmp/syscore" is replaced by "./"

p print out any substitutions as they occur

-t tape device

The "pax" command can also read tapes that have been writted in "cpio"
format. See the manual page pax(1) for more information.

##

Finaly here is what I got from HP.

I've had the opportunity to test this on a diagnostics system and have
example syntax that is closer to your scenario than the provided document.

For this example assume the files in the /tmp/mytar.tar file have the
absolute path of /root, and we want to restore the .profile file to /newdir

cd /newdir
pax -r -s!/root/!./!gp -f /tmp/mytar.tar /root/.profile

Richard