Tar cookbookEdit

Checking/listing archive contents

For a tgz archive:

$tar -t --gunzip -f archive.tgz

or:

$ tar -tzf archive.tgz

For a tbz2 archive:

$ tar -tjf archive.tbz2

Copying a directory across filesystems

For example, to move /home/jenkins to /var/lib/jenkins:

# cd /var/lib
# mkdir jenkins
# chown jenkins:jenkins jenkins
# cd jenkins
# sudo -u jenkins tar -cpf - /home/jenkins | tar xpf -

Copying the contents of a folder into another

$ tar cpf - -C $SRC_DIR . | tar xpf - -C $DEST_DIR

• c → compress
• x → extract
• p → preserve permissions, ownership, attributes, timestamps etc
• f directory → read from/write to file (in this case, -, which stands for standard in and standard out)
• -C directory → change into specified directory before proceeding

See also

• unzip cookbook