Hi,

Can anyone tell me how i can redirect stdout to a tar file.

This is what i want to do...

I have a file, say xyz. I want to create a new tar file(say 123.tar) in which xyz appears with a new name say "abc", i don't want to create a copy of xyz or modify it. I want to "cat xyz" and redirect that output to "tar". Is this possible.


Thanks,
Hari.

Here is an example of piping the output tar to transfer from one directory to another.
$ cd sourcedir; tar -cf - . | (cd targetdir; tar -xf -)

I don't think you could pipe extracted files through a pipe into tar. What you can do is first extract the abc file, rename the file to xyz, --delete the abc file in the archive and --append the xyz file.

$ tar xvf collection.tar abc
$ mv abc xyz
$ tar --delete --file=collection.tar abc
$ tar --append --file=collection.tar xyz

If what you had wanted to do is transfer files from one directory to another adding a file to the list, it would go someting like this:

$ cd sourcedir; tar --append --file=- . ~/xyz | (cd targetdir; tar-xf -)

This assumes you have the xyz file in your home directory.

Hi,

Thank you very much for your answer. I would also like to know whether i can accomplish the following action.

curent directory - ~

i have a file here "me.txt"

i want to create a new tar "mytar.tar" which is in say "/var/temp"

i want to add this file "me.txt" as "me1.txt" in this tar without creating a temorary copy of "me.txt" and without moving/renaming it in any way.(space is a constraint, it is due to this space constraint that i enquired whether i can pipe "me.txt" directly to the tar file.)


Thanks
Hari.

I don't think you can do it that way. Why do you need to change the name of the file.

Perhaps if you created a link named xyz which refers to file abc, and you used the -h modifier.

Hi,

I want to rename the file to bring some sort of consistency to the name of the files i archive. By this i mean if the orignal location of the file was say /home/user/user1/me.txt, i would like to add say "user1" to the name of the file when i add it to the archive to indicate that the file orignally belonged to "user1".

I didn't want to copy as there is a space constraint.

The -h option that u said works perfectly for me. Thanks a lot for all your help. Thanks.


Hari.

With a hard link, it would work, and it wouln't take more space:
> ln old_name.txt new_name.txt
> tar cf the.tar new_name.txt
> rm -f new_name.txt

Yves.

Hi,

Thanks a lot for your reply. Thanks.


Hari.