#Tar compress folder software

#Tar compress folder software

rw-r-r- 1 mit mit 159 15:41 Ĭopyright © 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Mit:/var/tmp$ tar -czf tree1/ -remove-files This is what I tried out on an ubuntu 10.04 console: Or at least some workaround until they fixed it. Another indication that keeping the tree was a bug. I would consider it unexpected and confusing behavior.)īut I have found that in gnu tar on some distributions gnu tar actually removes the directory tree. Let’s say you have a folder named TEST and you want to. (The other interpretation is of course also valid, but It makes no sense to keep directories in such a case. You turn to the tar command, which makes short shrift of converting folders into compressed files. But because this is a command line switch I would it expect to mean also directories, because in unix/lnux everything is a file, also a directory. If that shell variable value was badly entered, it is possible that the result could be deleted files from whatever directory you happened to be in last.Īlso the word 'file' is ambigous in this case. Thus I was hoping to simplify things by making tar itself do the remove.įor example, imagine a backup script where the directory to backup (ie. As I see it using any kind of follow-on 'rm' command is potentially dangerous in that situation. Because you must specify a relative path to a file/s to be compressed, you therefore must change to the parent directory to tar it properly. foo/ something.txt another.txt bar/ something-else.txt Is there a way I can modify the. However, my major prompting point for asking this question stems from tar's handling of absolute paths. tar archive, and when I extract it, it gives me a single folder foo containing some more stuff, like this. It looks like the consensus is that it doesn't remove directories. (In linux I tend not to really distinguish much between directories and files that much, and forget sometimes that they are not the same thing).

Although I too found the man page unclear on that point.

Yes, I suppose the 'remove-files' option is fairly literal. However it is only removing the individual files inside the directory and not the directory itself (which is what I specified in the command). I'm trying to tar a collection of files in a directory called 'my_directory' and remove the originals by using the command: tar -cvf files.tar my_directory -remove-files