Hi folks,

Having a bit of bother here. Made a silly mistake on production file server, and have basically messed it up.

The thing is, I have a backup from about 2 months ago, which is a complete system image with settings, config, LDAP, NFS, the works, so we are back in business. On a separate HDD, I have all of the users home directories, along with the messed up system. I am trying to use tar to restore only the users home directories, and leave everything else alone, obviously with file permissions intact.

Any ideas? I am pulling my hair out here!

Here is a very good references with examples that may give you some help:

http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manu...n/extract.html

http://www.washington.edu/computing/unix/tar.html

Specifically refer to Section2.8.2 Extracting Specific File

You can always use the -v or --verbose and -t or --list flags to check your command before extracting.

Thanks for your help AuroraCA, I guess I'm more of a newbie at this than I thought!

What I guess I'm really looking for is examples of commands using tar, both to archive and to extract the home directory. Currently, I am using a command something like:
obviously, there are a few more excludes!
Then to extract, I'm doing something like:
There are obviously things I am missing, the archive command seems not to produce anything, even though it is going through all the directories which I can see with -v.

Can you give me an idea of what you would do? Most appreciative of your help!

You can always create a temporary directory, untar the backup there and mv or cp the contents you want into the final destination, then remove the remaining backup bits you untarred.

Your problem is that you have not created a tar archive with your create command.
When you create an archive you must specify the -cf flags. The "c" is to create an archive and the "f" indicates the name of the file in which the archive will be stored. The first argument following the "f" will be used as the name of the archive. You do not need to use the .tar extension on the filename but it is good practice to indicate that the file is a "tar" archive.

The restore command would then be:
The command to restore a file or directory from a tarball would be:
Here is another tar tutorial with examples and explanations of the commands.

http://www.bellevuelinux.org/tar.html

To AuroraCA and trickykid: Thanks for all your help, I got there in the end! Never really had to use tar before, but was very glad to be able to use it! Thanks for all your help.