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From: mjs@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Mike Spitzer)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: extracting tar files with absolute pathnames relatively
Keywords: tar pathname
Message-ID: <2495@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 21 Apr 89 01:30:23 GMT
References: <1501@cfa205.cfa250.harvard.edu>
Reply-To: mjs@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Mike Spitzer)
Organization: Purdue University
Lines: 24

In article <1501@cfa205.cfa250.harvard.edu> todd@cfa250.harvard.edu (Todd Karakashian) writes:
>I am in posession of tapes containing tarfiles with absolute
>pathnames.  What I would like to do is to extract these files into a
>different tree structure than they were tarred from.  Thus, the
>tarfile /usr/foo/file should go into the disk pathname /temp/file.  I
>have been unable to find a way to do this -- does anyone know how?
>
>I am running SunOS 3.5.  I apologize if this is too simple a question.

Without modifying tar, the easiest was to accomplish this is to use
chroot.  Lucky for you, SunOS (at least 4.0... I think that 3.? had
this too) has a chroot(8) command. Try something like this (you'll
have to be root):

	mkdir /tmp/newroot
	cp tarfile /tmp/newroot
	chroot /tmp/newroot tar xf /tarfile

If you don't have the chroot program, it's pretty simple to write.
See the chroot(2) man page for more information.

--
Michael J. Spitzer		Purdue University Computing Center
mjs@mentor.cc.purdue.edu	pur-ee!mentor.cc.purdue.edu!mjs