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Messed up tar files

 
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# 1  
Old 11-03-2004
Data Messed up tar files
I created tar files for directories using this command:

tar -cvf * >tarfile

what happened was I got a file tarfile with a list of the files and it took the first file in each directory and overwrote it with the actual tar file. I've been trying to figure out since yesterday what I did wrong. Can someone help me please. And is there anyway to get those files back that were overwritten - they don't appear to be in the tar file - so probably not.

And I know I did something stupid just not sure what - so feel free to be brutal.
# 2  
Old 11-03-2004
uff!

the command should have been

tar -cvf tarfile .

when you specify tar with -f option, the first argument should be the archive file name!!

tar -cvf <archive file name> <directories to be archived>

In your case the '*' expanded into list of all files in the current directory. So the first file became archive file and you lost this file.

But I'm not so sure why it overwrote other first files in each directory. It shouldn't have been.
# 3  
Old 11-03-2004
Thank you for the fast response A4.
 
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