[SOLVED] script to create tar list and then un-tar using wildcards for lots of directories

green99 · 06-17-2012, 12:15 PM

Hi All,
I have a bunch of directories that contain tar files. instead of doing all everything manually I want to create a script that cd's into the dir creates a tar list, then extracts only certain file types using --wildcards ... then moves onto the next one

each directory is in numerical order e.g. dir001, dir002, dir003 ....and in each dir the tar files are called tar001, 002 ....

I thought something like "for num in {1..35} ; do cd dir$num ; tar -tf file$num.tar > list.txt ; tar -xf dir$num --wildcards *.bin ; done ..... realise this is wrong but perhaps I am close ?

thanks

pixellany · 06-18-2012, 05:08 AM

first, you can't do a "cd" inside a loop---each time thru the current directory will be different, so cd will be starting from a different reference point. to iterate through directories (or files) in a directory, just do something like:

Code:

for item in *; do
    stuff
done

or:

Code:

for item in `ls|grep "something"`; do
    stuff
done

Also, look at the man page for tar---eg when specifying the output file (f flag), the syntax to create an archive is eg "tar -cvf <newfilename> <path>"

Finally, if you want to create a bunch of archives, and the just extract certain ones, I wonder if it would be better to have 2 loops?

green99 · 06-26-2012, 04:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pixellany

first, you can't do a "cd" inside a loop---each time thru the current directory will be different, so cd will be starting from a different reference point. to iterate through directories (or files) in a directory, just do something like:

Code:

for item in *; do
    stuff
done

or:

Code:

for item in `ls|grep "something"`; do
    stuff
done

Also, look at the man page for tar---eg when specifying the output file (f flag), the syntax to create an archive is eg "tar -cvf <newfilename> <path>"

Finally, if you want to create a bunch of archives, and the just extract certain ones, I wonder if it would be better to have 2 loops?

thanks for you reply, apologies for the delay in replying, your post pointed me in the right direction