Tar question

[Konrad Heuer]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Charles Howse wrote:

> I'm a little confused about the arguments for tar.
> I want to tar the contents of a directory and save that .tgz file for
> backup purposes.
>
> Problem is, when I copy larry.tgz to /disk2 and:
> Tar xvfz larry.tgz
> It creates the /disk2 file structure within /disk2.
>
> # cd
> # ls /disk2
> # freebsd larry (directories)
> # tar cvfz larry.tgz /disk2
> # cp larry.tgz /disk2
> # cd /disk2
> # tar xvfz larry.tgz
> # ls
> # freebsd larry disk2 (directories)
>
> How can I make tar not create the directory structure within the same
> directory?
> Does that make sense?
> I tried tar cvfzP, no joy.
>
> Man tar didn't have anything that jumped out at me, but I could have
> missed or misunderstood something.
> If the solution is in the man page, I would appreciate a reference to
> the section, so I can re-read it to understand.

My suggestion is:

tar cvCfz /disk2 larry.tgz .

tar will cd to /disk2 before interpreting the dot - thus the content of
/disk2 will be archived, but without a leading "disk2" in the table of
contents.

Regards
Konrad Heuer (kheuer2 at gwdg.de)  ____            ___  _______
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