Dears,

I'm writing linux script to backup home directory using tar with "W" option for verification , but getting the following warning :

tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
tar: Archive contains file names with leading prefixes removed.
tar: Verification may fail to locate original files.
tar: home/_17jb.cfs: Warning: Cannot stat: No such file or directory

can any one tell me why I'm getting these warnings ?, when I checked the archive I found these files exist in it and the in the home directory .

The tar command removes the leading slash, so that the paths in the tar file are relative paths. This is for safety reasons.

This means that the verification stage may be unable to find the original files. Because it is using the relative paths it finds in the tar file, it will only be able to find the original files if your current directory is the root directory (so it gives the warning "Verification may fail to locate original files").

This happened in your case, because your current directory was not root (so you received a stat error, which means the verification failed). If you want to get rid of the warnings, you would need to do something like this:

If you leave the slash at the start of home, you will get warnings, but the verification at least will succeed.

Thank you very much for this great help.