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Full Discussion: Remove files from tar archive which are more than 1000 days old.
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Remove files from tar archive which are more than 1000 days old. Post 302813515 by jim mcnamara on Monday 27th of May 2013 01:20:12 PM
Old 05-27-2013
The very first problem is that you do not create a relative tar archives:

You did this:
Code:
tar -cvf /path/to/my/file.tar /home/foo

Instead of this
Code:
cd /
tar -cvf /path/to/my/file.tar ./home/foo

Note the leading red dot.

To do what you ask, one way to do this extract a relative tar archive to some harmless disk somewhere, delete the file(s) you no longer want, then rebuild the archive. Note that most places do not do things this way, it is very cumbersome. Rather, there is a backup plan, and incremental backups made, say every day of the month. A full back up is made at month end. Then last month's incrementals are overwritten day by day.

You keep the month end backups and one month of incremental backups. We cycle on a 90-day basis, not 30.

If you had relative tar files (you don't) you could try something like this:
Code:
cd /someplace/harmless
tar xvf /path/to/file.tar
find . -type f -mtime +1000 -exec rm {} \;
tar cvf /path/to/file.tar ./
cd ..
rm -R ./harmless    # lose the files you restored
mkdir ./harmless

 

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LEARN ABOUT OSX

ptargrep

PTARGREP(1)						 Perl Programmers Reference Guide					       PTARGREP(1)

NAME

       ptargrep - Apply pattern matching to the contents of files in a tar archive

SYNOPSIS

	 ptargrep [options] <pattern> <tar file> ...

	 Options:

	  --basename|-b     ignore directory paths from archive
	  --ignore-case|-i  do case-insensitive pattern matching
	  --list-only|-l    list matching filenames rather than extracting matches
	  --verbose|-v	    write debugging message to STDERR
	  --help|-?	    detailed help message

DESCRIPTION

       This utility allows you to apply pattern matching to the contents of files contained in a tar archive.  You might use this to identify all
       files in an archive which contain lines matching the specified pattern and either print out the pathnames or extract the files.

       The pattern will be used as a Perl regular expression (as opposed to a simple grep regex).

       Multiple tar archive filenames can be specified - they will each be processed in turn.

OPTIONS

       --basename (alias -b)
	   When matching files are extracted, ignore the directory path from the archive and write to the current directory using the basename of
	   the file from the archive.  Beware: if two matching files in the archive have the same basename, the second file extracted will
	   overwrite the first.

       --ignore-case (alias -i)
	   Make pattern matching case-insensitive.

       --list-only (alias -l)
	   Print the pathname of each matching file from the archive to STDOUT.  Without this option, the default behaviour is to extract each
	   matching file.

       --verbose (alias -v)
	   Log debugging info to STDERR.

       --help (alias -?)
	   Display this documentation.

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright 2010 Grant McLean <grantm@cpan.org>

       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

perl v5.16.2							    2013-08-25							       PTARGREP(1)
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