UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello guys,

I am sure this has been asked before, but honestly, I cant find post talking about it.

Here is what I need:

- A tar file will be generated manually by user
- This tar file is then used within a bash shell script

My source folder structure is like this:

Code:

 
/basepath/day1
/basepath/day2
/basepath/day3

So, in a folder, I do have several subfolders. On each of these subfolders, I do have files and more subfolders

I want to tar the content of one of these 'day' folders, but the two ways I tried are:

Code:

 
(placed in /basepath/day1):
tar -zcf day1.tar.gz .

Result is that tar.gz file is added to the same tar.gz file itself. These causes problem when uncompressing

Code:

 
(placed in /basepath/):
tar -zcf day1.tar.gz ./day1

This is causing, that, when I untar the file in a tmp directory, all is included in the day1 directory, this way:

Code:

 
tar -zxf ./day1.tar.gz -C /tmp

What I got is:

/tmp/day1/.....

My script is expecting content in /tmp without any more subfolders


Any advise you can give me guys?
Basically what I am trying to get is just similar as we do in windows: we zip files and folders, and the unzip them in any other folder without informaton from absolute paths

So getting this:

From:
/basepath/day1/file1
/basepath/day1/file2
/basepath/day1/subfolder/file3
/basepath/day1/subfolder/file4

To this:
/tmp/file1
/tmp/file2
/tmp/subfolder/file3
/tmp/subfolder/file4

And not this
/tmp/day1/file1
/tmp/day1/file2
/tmp/day1/subfolder/file3
/tmp/day1/subfolder/file4

As I said, if I tar with first option (tar -zcf day1.tar.gz .) I got the file tar.gz itself compressed. When uncompressing, I am getting some "you cant use utime" error

I hope I could explain myself

Thanks a lot in advanced!

I'm confused.
Say you have directories like this

Code:

month
  day1
  day2

IF you want a tar ball of /month/day1, with the tar ball IN that same directory:

Code:

tar zvfc /tmp/month.day1.tar  /month/day1
cp /tmp/month.day1.tar  /month/day1/month.day1.tar

That creates a tar archive with an absolute path, which is not all that useful for some things.

This creates a relative path:

Code:

cd /month
tar zvfc /tmp/month.day1.tar  ./day1
cp /tmp/month.day1.tar  /month/day1/month.day1.tar

Thanks for the answer, I will try to make this clearer

I do have the following structure:

/backups/20110701
/backups/20110702
/backups/20110703
...

On each date folder, I do have

/backups/20110701/scripts
/backups/20110701/templates
/backups/20110701/file.txt

Inside 'scripts' and 'templates' there are files, but no more subfolders

I would like to have a 20110701.tar.gz file, when, untar in /tmp, resulted in this:

/tmp/scripts
/tmp/templates
/tmp/file.txt

instead of

/tmp/20110701/scripts
/tmp/20110701/templates
/tmp/20110701/file.txt

If I create the tar file being at /backups/20110701 in this way:

Code:

tar -zcf 20110701.tar.gz .

The tar.gz file is added again in the tar file, so when I list content, I get:

tar -tl 20110701.tar.gz
./scripts
./templates
./file.txt
./20110701.tar.gz

This is causing me problems when uncompressing

Can you help?

Thanks a lot