UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hi

Somebody must have done this before, but I can't seem to find any answer on my problem.
On HP-UX 11i v3 I have a relatively large tar ball (~120 GB), and I want to create the directory structure only from the archive.
There is no option to make a new archive with only the directory structure, which would have been the easier way out.

Hope that somone has an answer to this.

Thank you in advance.

This might work (untested):

Code:

tar tf archive.tar | sed 's/\/[^\/]*$//' | sort | uniq | xargs mkdir -p

The sed-call strips the last component from all pathnames (like dirname), sort and uniq eliminate duplicates and the last command creates the directories.

You probably will have to adapt the sequence to your needs.

Thank you. I guess it will work as I requested (it's running at the moment).

What I forgot to mention was that I would like to keep the original permissions and ownership, which you don't get with this method.

I've already kept my colleagues busy with this puzzle for hours, and I am still surprised that there's not an easier way

This is a two step approach, but it should do what you request:
1) create an "exclude file" containing all entries that are NOT directories (hoping your grep installation can use EREs).
2) untar the tarball excluding above; this will create the directories with owner info and permissions:

Code:

tar -ztf arch.tar.gz|grep -E "[^/]$" >excl
tar -zxf arch.tar.gz -X excl

You may need to anchor the result according to your needs.