I use the following tar command to try to backup my entire file system
tar -cvpzf test/backup.tar.gz --exclude=/test
And I receive the following error message
tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive
Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information.
Can somebody point me in the right direction as to how to use tar and explain why it's trying to create an empty archive?
You defined what to exclude, but didn't define what you actually want in the archive. Supply at least one path. If you want entire filesystem, then tar -c....... /
Related
I'm trying to untar a tarball of files and the shellcode will not work properly, the directory of the tarball is /problems/like1000_0_369bbdba2af17750ddf10cc415672f1c and my user is publicVoid#pico-2019-shell1: . There are about 1000 tar files and I need to get to the last one, any help would be appreciated as I am a beginner in this.
#! /bin/sh
for f in 1000.tar
do
tar xf "$f" -C publicVoid#pico-2019-shell1:/problems/like1000_0_369bbdba2af17750ddf10cc415672f1c
done
This is the error
publicVoid#pico-2019-shell1:~/bin$ ./tarScrip
tar: 1000.tar: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
publicVoid#pico-2019-shell1:~/bin$
I'm working on the same thing too but it seems like you cant. the best bet is to try and untar it using a program that will allow it to. the tr file is a file containing may backups so there is a chance that the 1000 tar might cause a lot of lag due to the size. I am a beginner at shellcode but I have been somewhat successful at the shell. I do this for fun but I wish you good luck and may u win the cash
I have a .tgz file made with tar cvzf tartest.tgz tester/* and if I list the tar with tar --list -f tartest.tgz file, I have the following structure
tester/2017-08-02_131404.png
tester/cfg.pdf
tester/tests/
tester/tests/1.png
tester/tests/2.png
tester/tests/3.png
tester/tests/4.png
tester/tests/5.png
If I compare the tar with the original folder by using tar -df tartest.tgz tester/*, everything ok, no problems, no errors
If I add the file 20171006_183137.png in the tester folder, and retry, I get an error, as expected:
tar: tester/20171006_183137.png: Not found in archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
If I add the file 20171006_183137.png in the tester/tests folder, and retry, I get no error and blank output.
If I add -v option during last test, I just get the list of the files in the tar.
Is there a way to recursive compare tar with original folder and subfolders?
According to this site, tar behaves as intended.
You should note again that while --compare (-d) does cause tar to
report back on files in the archive that do not exist in the file
system, tar will ignore files in the active file system that do not
exist in the archive.
The error you are getting for tar -df tartest.tgz tester/* is indeed an error (!) not a message like »archive and directory differ«. tar does not know how to treat files that are not in the archive.
If you also want to compare the other way around, you could use the method described in this answer (mount or unpack the archive and use diff -r against the original directory).
If you are only interested in a file's existence and not content, access dates, and so on, you could list the file names from the archive and from the original directory and compare them with diff:
diff <(tar -tf tartest.tgz | sort) <(find tester/ | sort)
The command works only if there are no file names with linebreaks in them.
Use diff -y or the comm command for a more readable output.
With PHP I am using exec("tar -xf archive.tar -C /home/user/target/folder") to extract the contents of a specific archive (archive.tar) into the target directory (/home/user/target/folder), so that all existing contents of the target directory will be overwritten by the new ones that are contained in the archive.
It works fine and all files in the target directory are being overwritten after extract, but there is one directory in the archive that I would like to omit (from extracting and thus overwriting the existing one in the target folder)...
For example, the archive.tar contains:
folderA/
folderB/
folderC/
folderD/
fileA.php
fileB.php
fileC.xml
How could I extract (and overwrite) all except (for example) folderC/? In other words, I want folderC and its contents to remain intact in the user's directory and not be overwritten by the one contained in the tar archive.
Any suggestions?
(Tar on the hosting server is GNU version 1.23.)
You can use '--exclude' to omit a folder:
tar -xf archive.tar -C /home/user/target/folder" --exclude="folderC"
There is the --exclude PATTERN option in the tar tool.
Check: tar on linuxcommand.org
To be on the safe side, you could remove all write permissions from the folder. For example:
$ chmod 000 folderC/
An then do a normal tar extract (as regular user). You'll get some error messages on console, but your folder will remain untouched.... At the end of the tar, change back your folder original permissions. For example:
$ chmod 775 folderC/
Of course '--exclude' tar option is the right solution to this particular problem, but, if you are not completely 100% sure about a command syntax, and yor're handling critical data, my solution puts you on the safe side :-).
Write --exclude='./folder' at the beginning of the tar command.
In your case that is,
exec("tar -x --exclude='./C' -f archive.tar -C /home/user/target/folder")
I encountered an issue when I tar a directory. There is a backup file in one of the sub directory created by another user and it doesn't allow other user to read. so my tar command was failed.
My question is: Can I ignore this file (actually this file is not important) and tar the rest of the files/directories?
From Gnu tar manual:
To avoid operating on files whose names match a particular pattern,
use the --exclude' or--exclude-from' options.
`--exclude=pattern' Causes tar to ignore files that match the pattern.
so you can use
tar --exclude='your_file_to_exclude'
You can globally ignore read failures with some tar distros.
--ignore-failed-read
Do not exit with nonzero on unreadable files.
Let's say I'm trying to tar.gz all the files and folders in /usr/local/bin/data/*
The file name would be data-2015-10-01.tar.gz. When I untar it, is it possible that the root directory would be data-2015-10-01 followed by the contents of whatever is inside of data/* ?
If not, how can I tar /usr/local/bin/data/* but start at the /data/ folder level?
I can't do this unfortunately since the program spits out /usr/local/bin/data/ and I'm unable to change it.
cd /usr/local/bin
tar ... /data/*
There are a couple of ways to do what I think you're trying to accomplish. First, you can use the -C option to tar when creating the archive. That changes tar's current working directory to that directory before creating the archive. Not strictly required in your case, but probably helpful.
# tar -C /usr/local/bin -czf data-2015-10-01.tar.gz data/*
That at least gets you to a single directory named data. If you have control of the extraction (manually or via a script you provide to whomever is unpacking this), then you can do something like this on the extraction:
# mkdir -f data-2015-10-01 && tar -C data-2015-10-01 --strip-components=1 -xzf data-2015-10-01.tar.gz
This will remove the first path, which is "data" and extract everything from there into the directory which is your current working directory, data-2015-10-01. So, it isn't specifically tar that's doing the renaming, but you will effectively end up with the same result.
I've accomplished something similar with a symlink. This is not a great solution if you have (or might have) symlinks in the directory structure you're trying to archive. I have to say that I prefer #geis' solution to strip out the top-level directory on extract, but this gives you another option.
ln -s /usr/local/bin/data data-2015-10-01
tar -cvhf data-2015-10-01.tar.gz data-2015-10-01/
rm data-2015-10-01
(Note the additional -h option in the tar invocation.)