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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 SUSE

virt-tar-out

virt-tar-out(1) 					      Virtualization Support						   virt-tar-out(1)

NAME

       virt-tar-out - Pack a virtual machine disk image directory into a tarball.

SYNOPSIS

	virt-tar-out -a disk.img /dir files.tar

	virt-tar-out -d domain /dir files.tar

	virt-tar-out -d domain /dir - | gzip --best > files.tar.gz

DESCRIPTION

       "virt-tar-out" packs a virtual machine disk image directory into a tarball.

       The first parameter is the absolute path of the virtual machine directory.  The second parameter is the tar file to write.  Use "-" to
       write to standard output.

EXAMPLES

       Download the home directories from a guest:

	virt-tar-out -d MyGuest /home - | gzip --best > homes.tar.gz

JUST A SHELL SCRIPT WRAPPER AROUND GUESTFISH

       This command is just a simple shell script wrapper around the guestfish(1) "tar-out" command.  For anything more complex than a trivial
       copy, you are probably better off using guestfish directly.

OPTIONS

       Since the shell script just passes options straight to guestfish, read guestfish(1) to see the full list of options.

SEE ALSO

       guestfish(1), virt-cat(1), virt-copy-in(1), virt-copy-out(1), virt-edit(1), virt-tar-in(1), <http://libguestfs.org/>.

AUTHORS

       Richard W.M. Jones ("rjones at redhat dot com")

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 2011 Red Hat Inc.	<http://libguestfs.org/>

       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
       the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

       This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
       MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

       You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
       Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

libguestfs-1.18.1						    2013-12-07							   virt-tar-out(1)
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