hi everyone..

we recently created a tar file back up of our system at work, and there's a couple of files that should not have been entered in the back up .. (it's on a weekly script.. ) and i'm wondering if theres a way to extract/delete the unwnated files in the tar file without having to extract and re tar the file latter on.

I think this is how it can be done (not !00% sure though.. i'm still learning the commands and what not)

tar tzvf filename.tar <- that should tell me what's in the file?

tar zvf filename.tar --delete files.xxx <- that should delete the unwanted files correct?

sorry if this seems a little out of place i'm a

thxs. kennie
if you can , email an answer/solution to me here k8ke3@unb.ca

Yes you are correct, that will work. I've just tested it on my system to make sure you had the right syntax and you do. G d Luck!

I'm back again..

is there a wildcard command? we need to delete many files of the same file type.. is that possible?

also if we know the folder that there in can we just delete that folder?

thxs again

kennie

Say you have tarred your /home/yourname/scripts directory and in your scripts directory there are directories for perl, kornshell, cshell etc... and a tar -tvf scripts.tar shows this

rwxr-x--- user/group 1631 2001-06-01 15:37:09 scripts/perl/mon_users
-rwxrwxr-x user/group 282 2001-05-30 13:48:34 scripts/perl/pols
-rwxrwxr-x user/group 1921 2001-05-30 13:48:14 scripts/perl/dutree

I can do:
tar -vf script.tar --delete scripts/perl/dutree

or

tar -vf scripts.tar --delete scripts/perl

the first will delete my dutree script, the second will delete all my perl scripts under scripts/perl.

(and tired)

ok.. now that i've fought with our system all night long... i'm to the point where i'm ready to throw it out of the window....

is there any special trick to get a listing of what it in a file if its a
filename.tar.gz ?

thxs again.. kennie

The only trick you can do with that is to unzip it using either "gunzip foo.tar.gz" or "gzip -d foo.tar.gz" then do tar -tvf foo.tar. You can't do tar -ztvf foo.tar.gz because the tar command is looking for a valid tar file and this one is wrapped with a gzip program, so you have to unzip it first.

Actually,
You should be able to issue the command:
tar ztvf xxxx.tar.gz to see the contents of the file. I just tried it and it worked fine for me. I believe that is what the "z" option does. It can also be used to extract the files from a .tar.gz archive. i.e. tar zxfv xxxx.tar.gz will extract all the files from the xxxx archive.

Ascii2k,

I tried tar -ztvf foo.tar.gz and it failed for me, I can do tar -zxvf foo.tar.gz and that works fine. I dunn

eh, we tried that too here.. and it wouldn't work for us.. so we just gave up and deleted the whole tar file and created a new one without the garbage.. it's not what we really wanted to do.. but we were having slight difficulties with our system this morning...



kennie