[techtalk]Re: [techtalk] tar hell, help!

[bsweeney at physics.ucsb.edu]

>> Could you make another archive first, with "find . -type d" to grab
>> the whole  directory structure, and then untar the files into that?
Hmmm..that might work.  I'll give it a shot.
>
> Or use find to make a filelist and store this in a file, then use tar
> --files-from=NAME [other options] to create an achive with these files?
Don't think this will work, because I think the flaw is in tar's logic.  I
believe the way tar function is if you say, for instance:

   tar -cv --preserve --same-owner -f archive.tar /home/mails

where /home/mails has a bunch of subdirectories and files, it will create
the tar of mails as you requested, and then when untarring create the path
itself to put it back in.  Since I didn't ask it to tar /home, I don't
believe it applies the "preserve" and "same-owner" flags to it, because
it's not archiving that directory it's creating it to allow the path to be
fulfilled when extracting.

But, that's still guesswork; I don't have the machine in front of me right
now.  I'm recompiling the kernel on it to support the old machines RAID
controller, which of course isn't working right either ;P.

Yay.  Again, please CC any/all responses to
bsweeney at webmail.physics.ucsb.edu.

Thanks,
Brian