Hey,

I'm trying to unpack certain files from a tar archive - I don't want to unpack all of the 1.2GB file, just a particular bunch of it.

I tried an obvious command:

tar xvf /u8/sp_archive/2005.tar *1274*
All files I want to extract have "1274" in the name; I want to extract every file that does.

This produced nothing. I started working with tvf to see if I can actually get the desired files base on my input. Here is what I came up with:

My output:
mu1274.Apr.gz
mu1274.Apr.log
mu1274.May.log
mu1274.Apr.sp_table.gz
mu1274.Apr.index.gz

That is, just the results of my echo command. The files are there and I know those are the filenames within the archive - but they don't seem to be getting unpacked (or processed as if they would be if I specified x instead of t. If I do, they don't get unpacked).

Any ideas?

AIX 4.3

Hey There,

I'm using FreeBSD 4.1 right now and got it to work by just wrapping the regular expression in quotes. It may be that your shell is interpreting the * character before it passes it to tar:

The example above is what I used to test quickly and it failed without the quotes.

Let me know if that doesn't work. We've got some AIX boxes I can specifically try this on tomorrow. Also, if this doesn't work, try the "-L" option and put your string in a file. A bit of a pain, unless you want to match 100 unique files and don't want to type them on the command line, but will probably work, also

Best wishes,

Mike

You can also do


but you're right, the quotes are probably easier.

Niether of those solutions worked for me exactly as specified, however the following command worked fine:
It was about 40 files total - so it would have been a bit of a pain to do it all by hand, which is why I love for loops.

Thank you for the help - looks like I was just forgetting my quotes!

Nice creative fix. Good show!

, Mike