Say I have a large tar, the contents of which I am regularly extracting to a constant location.
I am wanting to keep this location a pristine instance of the extracted tar, and I could avoid the very wasteful process of always wiping out the output directory just to update it with a small change the tar might have by using the --keep-newer-files flag.
But what would I do about removing files from the output location that no longer exist in the archive?
The standard tar command has a way to list the contents of an archive. The short form for this is tar -tf archive.tar.
By using this together with find, grep, and command substitution, you get the following:
rm -f $(find . -d | head -n -1 | grep -Fv "$(tar -tf archive.tar)")
Run this in the directory where you want the contents of the archive, and replace archive.tar with the path to the archive file.
Working from right to left for the pipeline inside the outermost command substitution:
find . -d: Lists all the files and directories under the current directory, listing them in depth-first order. The depth-first ordering is important here, as we plan to use this file list for deletions and therefore must delete directory contents before deleting directories themselves.head -n -1: Exclude the last line from the find command. This will remove the entry for /path itself, which may or may not be present in the archive. If we weren't doing things in depth-first order, this would instead be tail -n -1.grep -Fv "$(tar -tf archive.tar)": Pass the listing of the archive to a grep command, which will then filter out those lines from the list returned by find, so only the files which aren't' in the archive will be passed to the outter rm command.A couple of notes:
find reports things. With GNU tar and most archives, it should work. If it doesn't for your case, you can probably get it to work by using either sed or awk on the output of the tar command inside the innermost command substitution.
Find omits trailing slashes from directories, preventing matching those output from tar -t. 2. tar -t can potentially skip the printing of some directories. E.g. If a tar file contains only foo/dir1 and foo/dir2, tar -t will print those paths but not necessarily foo/. I can't explain this behaviour entirely either. I'm tolerating these directories not being removed for now - they will always be empty anyway. Thus I now have: rm $(find . -depth -type d -printf '%p/\n' -o -print | head -n -1 | grep -Fv "$(tar -tf ../*.tar)" | grep -v /$)
Commented
Sep 24, 2018 at 7:09
find arguments are inverted? -d (= -depth) is a global option, so it can come before or after the ..
-d is indeed a global option, but is still considered part of the [expression] section, the entirety of which must be after the path argument. Trying to use -d before the path produces an error in GNU find.
Commented
Oct 1, 2018 at 4:26
You could rely on the fact that extracted file will have a ctime later than the time you started extracting the archive.
So:
touch start
tar xf archive.tgz
find . -depth ! -cnewer start -print0 |
sponge /dev/stdout |
xargs -r0 echo rm -d
(here assuming GNU tools or compatible and sponge from moreutils, used to delay the removing until the full list has been gathered as otherwise deleting a file would update the ctime of its parent directory).
Remove the echo to actually do it (after you've verified it did what you wanted).
The grep -v trick did not work for me, as the archive was kinda big and the command bailed with Argument list too long. So here's an approach I used to remove the accumulated cruft of a MediaWiki installation:
$ tar -tzf mediawiki-1.35.0.tar.gz | cut -d/ -f2- > foo
$ find /var/www/mediawiki/ | cut -d/ -f5- | while read f;
do grep -qw "^${f}$" foo || echo "not in archive: ${f}"; done
One will have to play around with the -f argument to cut a bit to get it right, and the command here does not remove anything, it will just print out what's not included in our archive.
