Shell Programming and Scripting

Let me illustrate:

Code:

$ # Create a tar file with an absolute path to a folder,
$ # and an absolute path to a file
$ tar -cpf example.tar /etc/openvpn /etc/passwd

$ # list everything in the tar
$ tar -tf example.tar
etc/openvpn/
etc/openvpn/.keep
etc/openvpn/openvpn.conf
etc/openvpn/.keep_net-misc_openvpn-0
etc/openvpn/openvpn-status.log
etc/openvpn/ipp.txt
etc/openvpn/ccd/
etc/openvpn/ccd/tech02
etc/openvpn/ccd/nathan
etc/openvpn/ccd/cherylynn
etc/passwd

$

...so it remembers not just the file name and contents, but the path it came from, and the ownership of each folder along the way. Two different files named the same thing will not conflict as long as you use absolute paths.

Note that my version of tar, GNU tar, removes the first / from absolute paths, but not all of them do!

tar even lets you extract individual files via tar -xpf /path/to/file.tar -C / path/and/filename1 just/a/path ...

The -p tells it to be more complete about remembering and restoring file permission and ownership attributes. That's not too relevant when storing or extracting source code, but for backups is useful.

The -C tells it to change directory into / before extracting, probably a good idea if it contains absolute path names.