Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi Users,

i have a situation as below;

Code:

-rw-r--r--   1 t1elkpe  cmptl          0 Mar 18 12:00 file2
----------   1 t1elkpe  cmptl          0 Mar 14 16:07 file1
d---------   3 t1elkpe  cmptl          3 Mar 18 11:23 fd

now when i am tarting the above files below is what i get as output.



As visible fd directory is still tar in the final tar. Is there any way i can avoid this completely.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks and Regards
Rajan gupta

---------- Post updated at 07:52 AM ---------- Previous update was at 06:10 AM ----------

Hi Experts,

any suggestions???

Thanks.

Depending on your OS version, there can be a -L flag on the tar command. This refers to a list file that you can populate beforehand. In you case:-

Code:

$ cat /tmp/my_tar_list
file2

Code:

$ tar -cL /tmp/my_tar_list -f /tmp/my_tar_file

It's not too common, but a really good option and it's in AIX at least. What OS are you using?

It's extremely useful for extracting lots of files from a huge tar-file, i.e.

Code:

$ tar -tf my_tar_file > /tmp/my_tar_list

...edit the list file created to keep just the ones you want, then ....

Code:

$ tar -xvL /tmp/my_tar_list -f my_tar_file

Another option might be to ignore or handle the backup error. The tar-file you create won't have it anyway, so is that all you really need?



I hope that this helps,
Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK

Why not use the -X (exclude file) option to tar, or, extended globbing in bash to unselect that directory?
You will now say "I don't use bash" or "My tar doesn't have -X" to which I'll respond "You didn't mention your system or versions or implementations"

Hi Guys,

Thanks for reply. I am using solaris. And i am in process of design a shell script in bash which tar all the files mentioned as a regular expression and removes them from the location(just like recycle bin functionality) and when a particular file or directory is not able to tar completely it should ignore and tar rest of them. i have a seprate log which shows which files/dir have been tar or not tar.
Rest everything is working fine except that the when unable to tar the directory the tar file still kept the empty directory which on restoring replaces the original directory with contents which is incorrect.

If tar is not done it should not store this directory at all. How can i prevent the tar of such directories.

Hope this helps in better understanding of the issue here.

Thanks and Regards
Rajan Gupta

---------- Post updated at 09:50 AM ---------- Previous update was at 09:22 AM ----------

Another option that came in my mind is to remove the directory in tar. I know it is possible througfh exclude folder but in my case this is not working. Can anyone highlight the case how can i remove the exesting non permission empty directory from tha tar created so that i have a clean tar.

Regards
Rajan

Solaris (along with the majority of UNIX systems) has pax. You could just use find with the appropriate arguments to exclude all directories with mode 0. Since pax can read the file list on stdin, you can use a simple pipe:

Code:

find . \! \( -type d -perm 0 -prune \) | pax -w > test.tar

Regards,
Alister

Is the \ necessary before the ! ?

In case you didn't get the memo, today is International Gratuitous Backslash Quoting Day. Don't forget to celebrate.

All joking aside, no; it's not necessary. I'd edit it, but it won't hurt anything. Thank you for bringing attention to it. It may have confused a novice.

However, in some circumstances an exclamation point can cause problems, e.g. in bash when history expansion is enabled (although even in this instance, if whitespace follows it, no expansion occurs).

Regards,
Alister