How do I use the Unix tar command with an implicit filepath?

Question

I am using the tar -xvf command and it is taking the explicit path. However, the path is full.
Example:

tar -xvf 13.2.tar

It is taking the path of /mnt folder. The / folder is full.

How can I tar the file with the implicit path?

Answer 1

The difference between using canonical (aka explicit) and relative (what you're probably calling implicit) is whether you use a / at the beginning.

For example, if the current working directory is /usr/home/bob, the following commands have exactly the same effect

tar -xvf foo.tar *
tar -xvf ./foo.tar *
tar -xvf ./foo.tar ./*
tar -xvf /usr/home/bob/foo.tar *
tar -xvf /usr/home/bob/foo.tar ./*
tar -xvf /usr/home/bob/foo.tar /usr/home/bob/*

But I suspect that this isn't really your question. It seems more like you need to determine the disk usage, and locate a directory that's not full. This can be done with the df command.

df -k # space on disk in kilobytes
df -m # as above, but in meg
df -g # as above, but in gig

And you can use mount to show you what file systems are mounted at what devices.

Answer 2

I believe pax will do the trick

pax -r -s,/mnt,/gooddir, -f 13.2.tar

It should let you substitute in a new root directory.

Answer 3

Usually tar needs the --absolute-names or --absolute-paths option to retain the root '/' part while creating an archive. Even if you force it in that way, the extract skips the leading '/' too.

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However, if you have an archive with the leading '/' and you tar does not skip it while extracting, NoahD's answer should work in this form,

pax -r -s ',/mnt,/new/path,' -v -f 13.2.tar

I think pax does not handle compressed files, so you would need to pipe after decompress into pax.
That would go like this (assuming you have a gzipped archive)

gunzip -c 13.2.tar.gz | pax -r -s ',/mnt,/new/path,' -v

I found this wiki page on Google just now.

Answer 4

To create a tar file with a relative path,

cd /parent/of/dir/to/tar
tar cvf subdir.tar subdir

To unpack a tar into a specific directory other than the current working directory, use the -C (uppercase C) switch.

If you want to untar a file with absolute pathnames in it to a point other than root, you might need to mess about with chroot(1).