Dear Members

I make tar from multiple files for my backup but when I untar them, the first file adapt sm weird directory structure and the ones after that seems ok. please view how I tar and notice the locations

Please tell me what I am doing wrong.

That is correct. You are telling tar to verbosely create an archive of root/documents/daily-logs/24dec and 25dec to a file named 25dec.tar. If you don't want the preceding directory structure change to the directory with the file in it and it will only backup that file.

E,g

This assumes that the file 25dec is also in the daily-logs folder

1 members found this post helpful.

Respected Kustom;

You mean to say that first I have to change my directory to the directory where I have files which I need to make tar?

like I cant do it while I am working in some other directory? ( like the case i posted with error)

You can make a tar anywhere but think about what you are telling tar to do...

If you tell tar to backup /root/Documents/daily-logs/24dec its going to backup just that, the entire path and meta data for the files. This is by the design of tar, imagine for a moment that you have developed an application with a big directory structure that you want to be able to port to another system. This app is contained in /opt/app1 with multiple folders underneath, /opt/app1/folder1, /opt/app1/folder2, /opt/app1/folder1/subfolder1, /opt/app1/folder1/subfolder1/subfolder2.

You are currently in the root home directory, /root.

You tell tar to make a backup with the following:


Tar will backup the files and folders as:

opt/app1/folder1

opt/app1/folder1/subfolder1

opt/app1/folder1/subfolder2

opt/app1/folder2

So when you go to deploy the tarball on another system the directory structure is the same as it was on the original system.

Note that tar will be default remove the leading / from file and folder paths.

1 members found this post helpful.

@sudo_su: If you want to store or extract absolute paths (not usually recommended) you can with -P. If you want to change the directory use the -C option and state the directory. You might want to have a look at:

http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/tar.html

Edit: These are the relevant sections of the GNU Tar online Manual:

6.10.1 Changing the Working Directory
6.10.2 Absolute File Names

Looking at your original post, I think what you wanted was:

You can use the tar option -C <path> (or --directory=<path>) to have tar set its directory to what you want to use for the base of the archive tree instead of using the cd command.