Hello,

im making an bash script

and my aim is to backup:

i know i can do it using:
BUT i dont know how can i extract it easilly using one command into its pathes back?

should extract it? but it puts wrongly all files into one directory, setting path to / i would quess wont work?

The simple no questions pending way.

$ mkdir destination
$ cd destination
$ tar xzf ../archive.tar.gz
$ cd ../

Where .. is the parent direction, versus . which is the current directory. Otherwise man tar and tar --help might help. A lot of times questions like these are answered faster by trying them out in a test setup. Then using what you've learned.

Edit: The problem with using paths is that they're saved along with the files. And an old bug with tar is that /etc/passwd could be a file in the tar which is why you should never run tar as root.

Alternatively: You could copy the files to a directory and tar that directory. But there may be a tar way directly. It's still better to have a less prone to undesired results method. Like cd to / and use relative paths (./) and the created file specified with a usable path.

and after the commands you written executed i have directories like yum.repos.d, rpm-gpg in directory "destination", but i need to have them in its proper directories not there.. while i sitll want to keep existing files and dont overwrite them by these i extract.. so i dont much understand how you solve my initial question. i already known i can extract it to other directory, but i want to keep pathes

$ cd /
$ tar -czf /home/user/archive.tar.gz \
./etc/ \
./usr/local/ddos/ddos.conf \
./etc/fail2ban/jail.conf \
./nodewatch/scripts/nodewatch_config.php \
./etc/yum.repos.d* \
./etc/pki/rpm-gpg*

Something like that, the \ are optional if done as a one liner. They are saved "relative" to the current directory(which would be / if you cd to it first). To extract them to original locations, be located at / when extracted. Otherwise they extract under whatever directory you're in. This is basically how I clone linux installs that are < 4GB in size. Mod the fstab and the bootloader and off to the races. Extract to whatever filesystem is supported by the kernel of the install.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks, so the difference makes that dot added before full path?

And from where you perform the tar is important aka cd to / first. Otherwise the relative path would be ../../ and things could get complicated.