On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 10:18 AM, Florian Philipp <li...@f_philipp.fastmail.net> wrote: > Mark Knecht schrieb: >> Hi, >> I backed up my wife's home directory using tar in preparation to >> moving her to a new machine but I don't remember the exact command I >> used to do the tar command. When I tried to untar on the new machine >> it failed to do anything. (except use 30 minutes of CPU time...) >> >> MacMini home # tar -xjf /mnt/cdrom/evelyn.20100214.tar.bz2 /home/evelyn/ >> tar: /home/evelyn: Not found in archive >> tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors >> MacMini home # >> >> I'm currently running >> >> tar -tz /mnt/cdrom/evelyn.20100214.tar.bz2 >> >> and it's been going 15 minutes without writing anything to the screen. >> I assume that I need to list the contents of the tar file to figure >> out how to untar but I'm really not sure. >> >> How do I best proceed? >> >> Thanks, >> Mark >> > > Err, your tar commands are a bit wrong. > > tar -xjf /mnt/cdrom/evelyn.20100214.tar.bz2 /home/evelyn/ > tells tar to extract the parts of it which are under home/evelyn to the > working directory. > This might be what you wanted in the first place but I guess you rather want > tar -xjf /mnt/cdrom/evelyn.20100214.tar.bz2 -C /home/evelyn/ > which means extracting the complete content of the tar file to /home/evelyn. > > Your second command ... well, where to start: > 1. Since you didn't use the -f switch (as you did correctly in the first > command), tar expects input from stdin, not as a file specified on > commandline. That's why it hasn't done anything in the last 15 minutes. > > 2. With -z you specify that the file is compressed with gzip but the > file ending shows its compressed with bzip2. That's the -j switch > (again, correct in your first command). > > By the way: You should enable the -p switch when extracting the files in > order to restore permissions and so forth. > > Hope this helps! > Florian Philipp > > Wow! I'm really bad! I didn't get that about stdin at all. Never dawned on me... Stupid me...
Thanks Florian! OK, using Neil's suggestion tar tfv archivername results in the first few lines: MacMini ~ # tar tvf /mnt/cdrom/evelyn.20100214.tar.bz2 drwx------ evelyn/users 0 2010-02-13 14:50 home/evelyn/ drwx------ evelyn/users 0 2008-04-11 17:33 home/evelyn/.AbiSuite/ -rw-r--r-- evelyn/users 2614 2008-07-24 01:18 home/evelyn/.AbiSuite/AbiWord.Profile drwxr-xr-x evelyn/users 0 2010-02-12 19:21 home/evelyn/.xine/ drwxr-xr-x evelyn/users 0 2007-09-19 13:36 home/evelyn/.xine/cddbcache/ -rw-r--r-- evelyn/users 761 2007-09-19 13:36 home/evelyn/.xine/cddbcache/5e0 so I tried tar xfv /mnt/cdrom/evelyn.20100214.tar.bz2 -C / and because /home/evelyn already exists the files seemed to end up in the right place. Thanks, Mark
