tar: Removing leading `/' from member names

Question

root@server # tar fcz bkup.tar.gz /home/foo/
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names

How can I solve this problem and keep the / on file names ?

Answer 1

Use the --absolute-names or -P option to disable this feature.

Answer 2

I think it’s because tar takes relative paths. Try with the -P switch.

Answer 3

That's actually a feature, not a problem. Archives with absolute locations are a security risk. Attackers could use such archives to trick users into installing files in critical system locations.

Yes, you could use -P. But what's wrong with allowing tar to remove the forward slash, and simply requiring the user of the archive to explicitly do the extraction in the root directory? Then they're consciously impacting critical system locations, and can't do it by accident.

Answer 4

If you want to get rid of "Removing leading `/' from member names" being printed to STDERR, but still want to leave off those leading slashes as tar wisely does by default, I saw an excellent solution here by commenter timsoft.

The solution involves using -C option to change directory to the root (/), then specifying the file tree to archive without a leading slash, because now you only need a relative path. This does the same thing as a normal tar create command, but no stripping is needed:

tar fcz bkup.tar.gz -C / home/foo/