How to copy a file/directory without changing its attributes - linux

I want to copy a folder and files in it to another place preserving there attributes like create date, update date ,permissions etc..
How can i do that ?

Just make a tar of that folder or file and extract it where ever you want.
Its attributes will be intact.
To create a tar.gz archive from a given folder you can use the following command
tar -zcvf tar-archive-name.tar.gz source-folder-name
This will compress the contents of source-folder-name to a tar.gz archive named tar-archive-name.tar.gz
To extract a tar.gz compressed archive you can use the following command
tar -zxvf tar-archive-name.tar.gz
And you are done :)

Related

How to get the list of files (ls command) from bz2 archive?

What is the Unix bash command to get the list of files (like ls) from archive file of type .bz2 (without unzipping the archive)?
First bzip2, gzip, etc compress only one file. So probably you have compressed tar file. To list the files you need command like:
tar tjvf file.bz2
This command uncompress the archive and test the content of tar.
Note that bzip2 compresses each file, and a simple .bz2 file always contains a single file of the same name with the ".bz2" part stripped off. When using bzip2 to compress a file, there is no option to specify a different name, the original name is used and .bz2 appended. So there are no files, only 1 file. If that file is a tar archive, it can contain many files, and the whole contents of the .tar.bz2 file can be listed with "tar tf file.tar.bz2" without unpacking the archive.

How to create a tar archive from an absolute path and package files as if they were relative?

On Linux, I am trying to create a .tar.gz archive from a different directory, that is I have a bash script that will be executed from a different directory. The script will package the folder, I will give the absolute directory of the folder say /home/user1/Documents/folder1 however when it packages the tar file, it puts the entire absolute directory in the archive, whereas I only want the relative one from folder1.
For example:
tar czf /home/user1/Documents/folder1.tar.gz /home/user1/Documents/folder1
This will create an archive but where the first folder will be home and then inside that user1 inside that documents and inside that the folder1, no other subfolders from other branches of course.
Also the console gives this error:
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
I want it to be packaged as if I would execute the command from the same folder, so the only folder in the archive should be folder1, and inside that it's own subfolders.
So the archive inside should look just as if I would have executed this code from the same directory folder1 is in:
tar czf folder1.tar.gz folder1
You can use the -C option to change the directory before performing any operations:
tar czf /home/user1/Documents/folder1.tar.gz -C /home/user1/Documents folder1
Now, the contents of your archive will look like this:
$ tar tf /home/user1/Documents/folder1.tar.gz
folder1/
folder1/file1
The message you get is not an error, by the way. It's tar telling you that it made the paths in the archive relative so as to avoid overwriting files, which could easily happen when unpacking an archive with absolute paths. You can turn off the leading slash removal with -P, but you often don't want that.

Linux - how to rename files within a .tgz file without extracting contents and applying tar again?

I have a tar file called test.tgz , inside it are the following files:
tool.foo
atest.you
btest.you
ctest.you
t.you
I want to rename the files inside test.tgz to be:
0.foo
0.you
1.you
2.you
3.you
Without the use of extracting the files and repacking them. How could I accomplish this?
Even though you can't rename the files in the tar archive, you can rename them with a sed expression on the fly while they are being extracted. The option to tar is--transform [sed-expression].
You do need to extract the files before you rename them. When files are in a tgz, they are protected from change.

Compress files in a directory in a zip file with the shell

I want to compress files from the filesystem to a directory within a new zip archive or update an old one. So here is my example:
directory/
|-file1.ext
|-file2.ext
|-file3.ext
in the zip archive it should look like this:
new_directory/
|-file1.ext
|-file2.ext
|-file3.ext
I could copy the files to a new directory and compress them from there but i do not want to have that extra step. I haven't found an answer to that problem on google. The man page doesn't mention anything like that aswell so I hope somebody can help me.
I don't think the zip utility supports this sort of transformation. A workaround is to use a symbolic link:
ln -s directory new_directory
zip -r foo.zip new_directory
rm new_directory
If other archive formats are an option for you, then this would be a bit easier with a tar archive, since GNU tar has a --transform option taking a sed command that it applies to the file name before adding the file to the archive.
In that case, you could use (for example)
tar czf foo.tar.gz --transform 's:^directory/:new_directory/:' directory

trying to tar a directory lists the directory instead

so I did this
tar cvzf test.zip FP
with the intention of creating a zip of the directory FP
however, it instead lists the directories inside the zip
FP/
FP/php/
FP/php/pdf/
FP/php/docs/
FP/aspnet/
FP/aspnet/pdf/
FP/aspnet/docs/
how do I go about tarring the directory?
Your command is good indeed.
Listing appear when specifying v option (in 'cvzf')
You can check what a gzipped tar file contain by running
$ tar tzvf test.zip
By the way you should avoid to put .zip extension on a "gzipped" tar file. If you really want to make a zip, use 'zip' package instead.
I think it DID create it. The list is just the command being verbose (-v).

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