tar issues...

[omrsafetyo]

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:

$ for file in `tar tvf /u8/sp_archive/2005.tar | grep 1274 | awk '{print $9}' | sed "s/\.\///" | head -5`
> do
> echo $file
> tar tvf /u8/sp_archive/2005.tar $file
> done

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

[eggi]

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:

# tar xvf bin.tar "*perl*"
perly
perltest.pl

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

[masijade]

You can also do

tar xvf bin.tar \*perl\*

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

[omrsafetyo]

Niether of those solutions worked for me exactly as specified, however the following command worked fine:

$ for file in `tar tvf /u8/sp_archive/2005.tar | grep 1274 | awk '{print $9}'`
> do
> tar xvf /u8/sp_archive/2005.tar "$file"
> done

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!

[eggi]

Nice creative fix. Good show!

, Mike