i wasn't sure if this should go in general or in here.

to make a long story short, i have a HUGE tar file that takes up 2/3rds of a separate harddrive. the problem is, i need to untar it, but that hd is the only hd i have that can store that much data.

so my question is, is there a way to "untar in place?" as in, as the files are being untarred, incrementally remove the tar archive.

many thanks.

If you are using GNU tar (most likely), you might try the --delete option.

apparently i can't combine x(tract) with d(elete)



i hope i don't have to go by another harddrive just to untar this

I see. First off, -d stands for --diff (not --delete). Moreover, even if you can't do both, you could tar in place one file at a time (i'm not sure, but I think that's what the program probably does internally anyway). Unless you have a very huge file inside the archive, you would be fine with

The `tac' ensures that they go out in the reverse order they went in (so a directory is not deleted before its contents). If you are paranoid about losing your data, I would recommend looking at `tar tvf' and seeing which files are largest.

Edit: small change in loop body (added exit 1)

NOTE: I am not responsible for any data loss resulting from this post. If you are unsure about anything, post a reply and we'll try to help.

brilliant, i was just working on a similar bash script now

after i scrutinize it, i'll give it a whirl and post the results

Hello,
Its good to be cautious when using "for file in" syntax...
"for file in $(tar tf myfile.tar | tac); do"
because if the tar file is that huge the $() will expand to one giant line that is much larger than bash can handle on a single "for file in".
This is going to be a Huge! operation and it would be undesirable for 1/3 of it to complete then have to start over when bash crashes on the long line.

Instead try streaming it and process one line of the output at a time...
"tar tf myfile.tar | tac | while read filename; do"
and this will not suffer from long line problems.

Best yet, put the tar file on one harddrive and untar it to another.
Either of these two methods will do this
1. cd /emptydrive ; tar xf /fulldrive/myfile.tar
2. tar /fulldrive/myfile.tar -C /emptydrive

i did a test extracting just two files (and not deleting) but the tar process just hung. the files were relatively small (~130kb each), but the harddrive was going crazy like it was trying to untar everything. i killed the process after about 3 minutes and the files were fine...but if this happens in the script, it'll never get to the delete part. any ideas?

i don't want to run the script until i'm absolutely sure this will go off without a hitch, since it took me a long long time to obtain the archive.

Hmm, I've done what you're describing, I think there's a misunderstanding of what --delete does.
I believe --delete causes the tar file to be "copied" and while being copied the specified files are not included in the copy. Then the original file is unlinked when the copy is complete.

So you need 2x disk space to perform a --delete. It does not delete files from the archive in place while performing an extract, the way I understand it now.

thanks for the tip!

unfortunately, i don't have another harddrive to untar this to, hence my problem.

but, borrowing your "tar tf myfile.tar | tac | while read filename; do" method and osor's idea, the standing code is:

good?

edit:

so the above snip won't work?

Oh gosh please don't do it that way. That will literally take weeks to complete and burn out hour HD if the tar file is gigabytes!
Every file will cause a copy/delete operation, each one taking a very long time to complete... and you don't have 3x space anyway.
You need 1x for the original tar file, another 1x for the copy when --delete is run, and final 1x for the extraction.
I think you need to install another hard drive, really.

i'm submitting a feature request to gnu tar then

This is the most interesting problem i've encountered in a long time (and I encounter many problems involving low resources)!

As a last resort, I started to think of all programs that know about the `tar' format. Obviously tar has been shown not to work. The cpio command doesn't even have a delete functionality. Then I remember a friend (more like mentor) of mine who used to use be able to edit sourcefiles of a tarball inside of emacs (in place). Being a vim user myself, I had no idea if it was just a frontend to the actual tar program. Cursory research shows that in the Emacs documentation, it says
which I assume to mean it has its own way of looking at tar files. If you already know about this, excuse this post. If you don't, maybe this might solve the problem.

P.S.
Is there a time constraint? When is this `due'?

yeah this is definitely an interesting problem. i imagined it'd be easy when i started, given all that linux is capable of :\

yeah, i just did a little research and apparently the tar archive format isn't all that complicated. somehow i remember being able to mount a FILE as a filesystem, which could work for me, but i don't know how to do this.

no official time constraint, but it is a pressing matter. if i don't find a solution within the next few days, i'll just have to buckle down and reluctantly buy another 100gb+ harddrive just for this one operation. and i'm not looking forward to that.

also, i do have enough gigabytes free on TWO harddrives (together) to hold the contents of the file, but i have no idea how one would untar to location A until it overflows and then continue to untar in location B...some kind of hybrid symlink..? no clue

this is so frustrating lol

edit: for the record, this tar is 75gb

ok basically all i did was untar it on 3 different harddrives by killing the tar process when i ran out of space and picking up again with the "-K startfile" option.

problem solved, sorta