The tar archive format and/or the command-line utility for working with tar files.
9
votes
5answers
953 views
How to de-unzip, de-tar -xvf — de-unarchive in a messy folder?
Usually, I unarchive things by $ mkdir newFolder; $ mv *.zip newFolder; $ cd newFolder; $unzip *.zip but sometimes I get lazy and just do in an arbitrary folder $ unzip *.zip so time-to-time messing ...
9
votes
2answers
17k views
Add/update a file to an existing tar.gz archive?
Is there a way to add/update a file in a tar.gz archive? Basically, I have an archive which contains a file at /data/data/com.myapp.backup/./files/settings.txt and I'd like to pull that file from the ...
4
votes
1answer
269 views
Find recursively all archive files of diverse archive formats and search them for file name patterns
At best I would like to have a call like this:
$searchtool /path/to/search/ -contained-file-name "*vacation*jpg"
... so that this tool
does a recursive scan of the given path
takes all files with ...
8
votes
2answers
673 views
What does “-” mean as an argument to a command?
I found this link on how to open tgz in one step.
gzip -dc target.tar.gz | tar xf -
What does the '-' mean?
12
votes
3answers
1k views
Why use superflous dash (-) to pass option flags to tar?
To create a tar file for a directory, the tar command with compress, verbose and file options can be typed thus:
$ tar -cvf my.tar my_directory/
But it also works to do it this way:
$ tar cvf ...
17
votes
2answers
791 views
What does .??* mean in a shell command?
The following command will tar all "dot" files and folders:
tar -zcvf dotfiles.tar.gz .??*
I am familiar with regular expressions, but I don't understand how to interpret .??*. I executed ls .??* ...
15
votes
2answers
4k views
tar cvf or tar -cvf ?
I have learned to use tar without '-' for options, like tar cvfz dir.tar.gz Directory/ but I recently came accross the slightly different tar -czvf syntax (I think the 'f' must be the last option in ...
5
votes
2answers
2k views
Can I automate tar's multi-volume-feature?
Ok, so I've just had a read through this page after a way to improve my current backup solution on my Debian server. Tar seems to be offering a quite nice multi-volume feature, although when I try it ...
10
votes
2answers
545 views
Tar up all PDFs in a directory, retaining directory structure
I'm trying to create a compressed tarball that contains all PDF files that exist in one of my directories. The directory structure needs to be retained. Empty directories are not needed, but I really ...
7
votes
3answers
593 views
Untar only a certain number of files from a large tarball
I have a large tarball that is busy being FTP'd over from a remote system to our local system.
I want to know if it is possible to start untarring lets say 50 files at a time so that those files can ...
2
votes
1answer
270 views
How do I dereference links when extracting from a tar file?
If I have a tar file, bob.tar, which contains real_file and link_to_real_file, in which the latter is a symlink, is there a way to extract the contents of bob.tar so that link_to_real_file will not be ...
