Hello, Pavel! Thank you very much for your answer. But this is not exactly what do I want.
I want to extract one archive with backup of some files to existing directry with necessary files. If archive does not contain a file, but I have it inside existing directory, I dont want it to be removed while unpacking archive. But if archive contains new file (here I mean that everything is files - diretory, symbolic link, anything) - I want tar to overwrite it.
For example:
➜ ~ mkdir -p mydir/dir-with-files
➜ ~ ln -s /dev/null mydir/link-will-be-dir
➜ ~ touch mydir/dir-with-files/file1
➜ ~ tar -cf mybackup.tar mydir/
➜ ~ rm -f mydir/link-will-be-dir
➜ ~ mkdir -p mydir/link-will-be-dir
➜ ~ touch mydir/dir-with-files/file2 mydir/link-will-be-dir/file-should-be-deleted-after-extract-since-its-parent-dir-become-symlink
➜ ~ tar -x --some-awesome-flag mybackup.tar
and now i want it to have:
mydir/dir-with/files contains file1 and file2
mydir/dir-will-be-link is symbolic link to /dev/null
01.11.2016, 11:04, "Pavel Raiskup" <[email protected]>:
On Tuesday, November 1, 2016 2:56:23 AM CET [email protected] wrote:
Hello.
I don't know if it is a bug or something like that.
What flag should I use if I want to overwrite existing non-empty directory by
symlink from my tar archive?
There's --recursive-unlink. But I would be careful to explicitly select
proper set of files to be extracted, rather then extract the whole archive
(there's high chance this will cause some disaster).
Documentation: info tar -n "Recursive Unlink"
PavelI've tried --overwrite flag and -U, that did not
work. Tried with tar version 1.29 and 1.28. Here is example:
➜ ln -s /dev/null test
➜ tar -cf archive.tar test
➜ rm -f test
➜ mkdir -p test/something
➜ tar --overwrite -xf archive.tar
tar: test: Cannot open: File exists
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
➜ tar -U -xf archive.tar
tar: test: Cannot unlink: Directory not empty
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
➜ rmdir test/something
➜ tar --overwrite -xf archive.tar
➜ echo $?
0
