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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 DEBIAN

bf_tar

BF_TAR(1)						    Bogofilter Reference Manual 						 BF_TAR(1)

NAME

       bf_tar - shell script to write a tar file of a bogofilter directory to stdout

SYNOPSIS

       bf_tar [-r] [-R] bogofilter_directory

DESCRIPTION

       bf_tar bundles a bogofilter working directory in tar format and copies it to standard output (your console, or where you redirect it, see
       EXAMPLES below).

OPTIONS

       The -r option causes bf_tar to remove inactive log files after the archive has been written successfully. The default is to leave log
       files.

       The -R option causes bf_tar to remove inactive log files before the archive is written. This may reduce chances that the resulting archive
       is recoverable should it become damaged. The archive may be smaller though. The default is to leave log files.

EXIT STATUS

       The script exits with status code 0 if everything went well, and nonzero if it encountered trouble.

EXAMPLES

       o   bf_tar ~/.bogofilter > outfile.tar

	   Writes a standard .tar file containing the essential files from ~/.bogofilter to outfile.tar.

       o   bf_tar ~/.bogofilter | gzip -9 -c > outfile.tar.gz

	   Writes a gzipped .tar.gz file containing the essential files from ~/.bogofilter to outfile.tar.gz.

       o   bf_tar `pwd`/mydirectory > outfile.tar

	   Prepend $(pwd)/ or `pwd`/ if you want to specify an absolute path instead of a relative path.

NOTES

       This script is meant for use with Berkeley DB based bogofilter versions.

       This script requires a SUSv2 compliant pax utility.

       This script expects a SUSv2 compliant shell. Solaris systems should have the SUNWxcu4 package installed (when bogofilter is configured) so
       that /usr/xpg4/bin/sh can be used.

AUTHORS

       Matthias Andree

Bogofilter							    03/15/2010								 BF_TAR(1)
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