Commands tagged tar

`tar xfzO` extracts to STDOUT which got redirected directly to mysql. Really helpful, when your hard drive can't fit two copies of non-compressed database :)

A quick find command to identify all TAR files in a given path, extract a list of files contained within the tar, then search for a given string in the filelist. Returns to the user as a list of TAR files found (enclosed in []) followed by any matching files that exist in that archive. TAR can easily be swapped for JAR if required.

If you want to decompress the files from an archive to current directory by stripping all directory paths, use --transform option to strip path information. Unfortunately, --strip-components option is good if the target files have same and constant depth of folders.

The idea was taken from http://www.unix.com/solaris/145941-how-extract-files-tar-file-without-creating-directories.html

This is freaking sweet!!! Here is the full alias, (I didn't want to cause display problems on commandlinefu.com's homepage):

Creates a .tgz archive of whatever directory it is run from, in the background, detached from current shell so if you logout it will still complete. Also, you can run this as many times as you want, if the archive .tgz already exists, it just moves it to a numbered backup '--backup=numbered'. The coolest part of this is the transformation performed by tar and sed so that the archive file names are automatically created, and when you extract the archive file it is completely safe thanks to the transform command.

If you archive lets say /home/tombdigger/new-stuff-to-backup/ it will create the archive /home/#home#tombdigger#new-stuff-to-backup#-2010-11-18.tgz Then when you extract it, like tar -xvzf #home#tombdigger#new-stuff-to-backup#-2010-11-18.tgz instead of overwriting an existing /home/tombdigger/new-stuff-to-backup/ directory, it will extract to /home/tombdigger/new-stuff-to-backup.2010-11-18/

Basically, the tar archive filename is the PWD with all '/' replaced with '#', and the date is appended to the name so that multiple archives are easily managed. This example saves all archives to your $HOME/archive-name.tgz, but I have a $BKDIR variable with my backup location for each shell user, so I just replaced HOME with BKDIR in the alias.

So when I ran this in /opt/askapache/SOURCE/lockfile-progs-0.1.11/ the archive was created at /askapache-bk/#opt#askapache#SOURCE#lockfile-progs-0.1.11#-2010-11-18.tgz

Upon completion, uses the universal logger tool to output its completion to syslog and stderr (printed to your terminal), just remove that part if you don't want it, or just remove the '-s ' option from logger to keep the logs only in syslog and not on your terminal.

Here's how my syslog server recorded this..

2010-11-18T00:44:13-05:00 gravedigger.askapache.com (127.0.0.5) [user] [notice] (logger:) Tarred /opt/askapache/SOURCE/lockfile-progs-0.1.11 to /askapache-bk/tarred/#opt#SOURCE#lockfile-progs-0.1.11#-2010-11-18.tgz in 4 seconds

Caveats

Really this is very robust and foolproof, the only issues I ever have with it (I've been using this for years on my web servers) is if you run it in a directory and then a file changes in that directory, you get a warning message and your archive might have a problem for the changed file. This happens when running this in a logs directory, a temp dir, etc.. That's the only issue I've ever had, really nothing more than a heads up.

Advanced:

This is a simple alias, and very useful as it works on basically every linux box with semi-current tar and GNU coreutils, bash, and sed.. But if you want to customize it or pass parameters (like a dir to backup instead of pwd), check out this function I use.. this is what I created the alias from BTW, replacing my aa_status function with logger, and adding $SECONDS runtime instead of using tar's --totals

{

local GZIP='--fast' PWD=${1:-`pwd`} F=$(date +${BKDIR}/%m-%d-%g-%H%M-`sed -u 's/[\/\ ]/#/g'

[[ ! -r "$PWD" ]] && echo "Bad permissions for $PWD" 1>&2 && return 2;

( ( tar --totals --ignore-failed-read --transform "s@^${PWD%/*}@`date +${PWD%/*}.%m-%d-%g`@S" -czPf $F $PWD && aa_status "Completed Tarp of $PWD to $F" ) & )

}

#From my .bash_profile http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

A *.tar.gz file needs to be unzipped & then untarred. Previously I might have unzipped first with

and then untarred the result with

(Options are extract, verbose, file)

Using the -z (decompress) option on tar avoids the use of gzip (or gunzip) first.

Additionally the -C option will specify the directory to extract to.

This Anti-TarBomb function makes it easy to unpack a .tar.gz without worrying about the possibility that it will "explode" in your current directory. I've usually always created a temporary folder in which I extracted the tarball first, but I got tired of having to reorganize the files afterwards. Just add this function to your .zshrc / .bashrc and use it like this;

and it will create a folder for the extracted files, if they aren't already in a single folder.

This only works for .tar.gz, but it's very easy to edit the function to suit your needs, if you want to extract .tgz, .tar.bz2 or just .tar.

More info about tarbombs at http://www.linfo.org/tarbomb.html

Tested in zsh and bash.

UPDATE: This function works for .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tgz, .tbz and .tar in zsh (not working in bash):

UPDATE2: From the comments; bepaald came with a variant that works for .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tgz, .tbz and .tar in bash:

The following command finds all the files not modified in the last 5 days under /protocollo/paflow directory and creates an archive files under /var/dump-protocollo in the format of ddmmyyyy_archive.tar

This is a shortcut to tar up all files matching a wildcard. Tar doesn't have the --include (apparently).

Here how to recover the remote backup over ssh

Execute it from the source host, where the source files you wish backup resides. With the minus '-' the tar command deliver the compressed output to the standar output and, trough over the ssh session to the remote host. On the other hand the backup host will be receive the stream and read it from the standar input sending it to the /path/to/backup/backupfile.tar.bz2

xargs deals badly with special characters (such as space, ' and "). In this case if you have a file called '12" record'.

Parallel https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ does not have this problem.

Both solutions work bad if the number of files is more than the allowed line length of the shell.

xargs deals badly with special characters (such as space, ' and "). To see the problem try this:

touch important_file

touch 'not important_file'

ls not* | xargs rm

Parallel https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ does not have this problem.

This may seem like a long command, but it is great for making sure all file permissions are kept in tact. What it is doing is streaming the files in a sub-shell and then untarring them in the target directory. Please note that the -z command should not be used for local files and no perfomance increase will be visible as overhead processing (CPU) will be evident, and will slow down the copy.

You also may keep simple with, but you don't have the progress info:

You set the file/dirname transfer variable, in the end point you set the path destination, this command uses pipe view to show progress, compress the file outut and takes account to change the ssh cipher. Support dirnames with spaces.

Merged ideas and comments by http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/4379/copy-working-directory-and-compress-it-on-the-fly-while-showing-progress and http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3177/move-a-lot-of-files-over-ssh

Avoids creating useless directory entries in archive, and sorts files by (roughly) extension, which is likely to group similar files together for better compression. 1%-5% improvement.

What happens here is we tell tar to create "-c" an archive of all files in current dir "." (recursively) and output the data to stdout "-f -". Next we specify the size "-s" to pv of all files in current dir. The "du -sb . | awk ?{print $1}?" returns number of bytes in current dir, and it gets fed as "-s" parameter to pv. Next we gzip the whole content and output the result to out.tgz file. This way "pv" knows how much data is still left to be processed and shows us that it will take yet another 4 mins 49 secs to finish.

Credit: Peteris Krumins http://www.catonmat.net/blog/unix-utilities-pipe-viewer/

Create a tar file in multiple parts if it's to large for a single disk, your filesystem, etc.

Rejoin later with `cat .tar.*|tar xf -`

The magic is performed by the parameter -t

This script will list all the files in the tarballs present on any folder or subfolder of the provided path. The while loop is for echoing the file name of the tarball before listing the files, so the tarball can be identified

This command will copy a folder tree (keeping the parent folders) through ssh. It will:

- compress the data

- stream the compressed data through ssh

- decompress the data on the local folder

This command will take no additional space on the host machine (no need to create compressed tar files, transfer it and then delete it on the host).

There is some situations (like mirroring a remote machine) where you simply cant wait for a huge time taking scp command or cant compress the data to a tarball on the host because of file system space limitation, so this command can do the job quite well.

This command performs very well mainly when a lot of data is involved in the process. If you copying a low amount of data, use scp instead (easier to type)

The command as given would create the file "/result_path/result.tar.gz" with the contents of the target folder including permissions and sub- folder structure.

The lifehacker way: http://lifehacker.com/software/top/geek-to-live--encrypt-your-data-178005.php#Alternate%20Method:%20OpenSSL

"That command will encrypt the unencrypted-data.tar file with the password you choose and output the result to encrypted-data.tar.des3. To unlock the encrypted file, use the following command:"

This command creates tar zip of a directory and its sub-directories.

creates a compressed tar archive of files in /path/foo and writes to a timestamped filename in /path.

Use tar command for a backup info with a date of creation