Comments on: Linux / UNIX: tar Command Stay In Local / File System When Creating Archive

By: Peg Perego Uno Stroller

Peg Perego Uno Stroller — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 06:57:00 +0000

great post as usual .. thanks .. you just gave me a few more ideas to play with

By: LightningCrash

LightningCrash — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:52:41 +0000

I seem to recall if you explicitly call a directory, tar will ignore your one-file-system argument for that case.

Ie if you execute
tar cvzf /path/to/file.tar.gz --one-file-system /*
You’ll end up with /sys and /proc et al, because you globbed them in!

Definitely test it before you send it after 1TB of data…

By: Vladimir

Vladimir — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:57:36 +0000

Just a little addition – use tar’s -C

tar cvf /dev/st0 -C /*

By: King

King — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:09:13 +0000

Old habit for me is rather than using absolute pathname for root, you cd there and use the relative pathname “.” instead. Old versions of tar would restore the file exactly as it was created in the archive, so if you did this:

tar cvf /dev/st0 /

it created a tar file that could only be restored in /. Whereas if you do this:

cd /
tar cvf /dev/st0 .

you get a tar file that can be restored anywhere (including root as long as you cd there first).

Yes, many versions of tar have fixed this and Linux strips leading /s by default, but unless you’re sure and there’s no chance you may ever take your tar file to another machine (say an old Unix box), this is an easy way to be sure.

By: Travis

Travis — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:00:14 +0000

It seems whenever I think of a problem you immediately post the solution.

Thank’s Vivek!