RE: [Help-tar] Amending contents of absolute-path tar files without extracting to root dir

[Nick Lewis]

Sergey

Thank you very much for the solution. In the meantime I have downloaded
the source and added an option to my local copy of tar:
 
  -Q, --make-absolute        add leading `/'s to file names to make them
                             absolute

I will probably continue to use this option because it is slightly
easier for me to remember and I do not want to feel my effort in adding
the option was wasted. However in the light of your response I will not
be submitting a patch with this new option.

Best Regards
Nick  

-----Original Message-----
From: Sergey Poznyakoff [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: 12 May 2009 19:47
To: Nick Lewis
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [Help-tar] Amending contents of absolute-path tar files
without extracting to root dir

Nick Lewis <address@hidden> ha escrit:

>    I have tars that contain files with absolute paths and wish to
replace
>    some of the files. However I do not wish to extract all the files
into
>    the root directory as this will adversely affect operation of my
>    computer. Therefore I wish to extract the files to a subdirectory,
make
>    the desired replacements and tar it all up again with the
>    paths appearing as before.

Use the --transform option, e.g.:

   tar -cf archive.tar --transform s,^,/, *

Or, if tarring the entire directory:

   tar -cf archive.tar --transform s,^\.,, .

For a detailed description of that option, refer to

 
http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/transform.html#IDX380

Regards,
Sergey

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