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From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: extracting tar files with absolute pathnames relatively
Message-ID: <8273@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 23 Apr 89 03:40:45 GMT
References: <1501@cfa205.cfa250.harvard.edu>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 12

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.

GNUtar and PAX (both free but not public domain) will do this.  GNUtar
just strips the leading / if present, PAX lets you do a regex substitution
on the pathname.
Otherwise you have to set up a fake environment and chroot into it.

Les Mikesell