UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have figured out how to create a tar file that holds all the files in a particular directory. The plan is to move the tar to a new system via FTP so that we can test the new system with our files and libraries. What I can't figure out is how to unzip the tar file; I keep getting messages that have to do with file permissions and time/date stamps. I have full read/write/execute access to these files, so I'm not sure what is happening. So my question is this, once I figure out the permission problem, when I unzip a tar file (in this case a directory of files), how do I determine where the resulting unzipped files will go? I've seen many examples, but it seems that they unzip where the .tar file is located - is this true? Is there an easier way to move many files from one system to another, other than using tar? I'm not very knowledgeable regarding Unix commands, so I apologize if this is a menial question. As always, any help is appreciated.

Okay, so a few questions:-

The more clues you can give us, the better.



Thanks, in advance,
Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK

To create the .tar file, I was in a temp directory and ran the following:

Code:

'tar -cvf myfile.tar /pulsar/paysrc/libsrc'

Then, viewing the tar using

Code:

'tar tvf myfile.tar'

I see that all the contents of libsrc...as an example:

Code:

'-rw-rw-r-- 203 224     521 Jun 10 10:57:17 2002 /pulsar/paysrc/libsrc/exists_file.c
'

So, I will then need to FTP myfile.tar from Unix to my pc and then to a remote Unix server where it will need to be extracted. I am thinking that, since the path is included, it will attempt to extract to the original directory (/pulsar/paysrc/libsrc)...but I am not clear on this. If this is true, then will the directory tree be created or will we have to make the appropriate directories first?

Just for further info - we are testing an upgrade to our Unix server and to the latest version of AIX and the whole purpose of this is to see if all our programs (some of which are very old) will run on the new system. Programs are written in C and in Fortran as well as some shell scripts. The new server is not in-house, but rather is being provided remotely for our testing.

Hope this makes a bit more sense.

Since you archived using absolute path, it will recreate that very same structure from root (or use what it finds if tree exist...)
You didnt say what you are migrating from... ( Is it an old RS6000 ?) what OS and version?

rbatte1 asked what the id on the target system is...

uid=0(root) gid=0(system) groups=2(bin),3(sys),7(security),8(cron),10(audit),11(lp)

and the permission in the target directory (as well as sub-directories) is...

drwxr-xr-x 7 root system 256 Jun 13 07:36 paysrc

In response to vbe: we are migrating from AIX version 5.3 to 7.1

Thats not so old so all should work... I was expecting aix 4.3 ( I still have a few 4.2.1 boxes running with no hope of migration... they will die when new applications will be finished..)

The ksh has not the same behaviour. in 7.1... You may need to modify some scripts ( I cant rememeber now what it was...) it has to do with test conditions and the man page of aix was of no help... ( I migrated last year server from 6.1 to 7.1 and had some scripts failing...)

@vbe, that is certainly good information. Do you happen to know the restriction on a .tar file size?