tar question?

shanenin · 04-18-2004, 10:58 PM

I am playing aroung using the tar command. I do not understand why it is behaving this way. Lets say I use this command.

Code:

tar -czf shane.tar.gz /home/shane

shouldn't this just tar my home directory? Why is it also including home? How would I do it differently so it just tars my home directory?

whansard · 04-18-2004, 11:14 PM

that command should just tar your home dir. with the full path. add a v in there so you can see what is happening.

hw-tph · 04-19-2004, 12:59 AM

You are specifying an absolute path (beginning with a slash) so tar assumes you want the full path in the archive. If you are in /home, type tar cfvz shanehome.tar.gz shane instead. This will create an archive with the shane directory as root.

Btw, just dropping the hyphen before the flags to tar will make tar ignore the order of the flags, so I recommend using it that way.

Håkan

shanenin · 04-19-2004, 08:58 AM

I would like to work from my mounted vfat partition, so I need to specify the whole path. I will eventully want to tar my /usr partition(4gb) and I only have enough room to work from my vfat partition(not enough room in my root).

davec · 04-19-2004, 09:11 AM

you don't need to specify the whole path, you can change into directories on your vfat partition same as you would on your linux partition, then you can tar each directory just as hw-tph said you can....

whansard · 04-19-2004, 04:06 PM

code:tar -czf shane.tar.gz /home/shane

tar czvpf /path/to/fat/shane.tar.gz -C /home shane

the -C /home means change directories to /home, then tar shane

or maybe this appeals to you more

(cd /home;tar czvpf - shane > /mountpointfat32/shane.tgz)