Re: undo extraction

[Chris Gray <cgray@tribsoft.com>]

>>>>> Colin Watson writes:

    cw> Rob Hudson <rob@eugene.net> wrote:
    >> I wrote a little perl script [1] that gets the names of the files from
    >> a tarball, then removes all the files and directories found inside the
    >> tarball.
    >> 
    >> It comes in real handy when a tar archive dumps into the currently
    >> directory and makes a big mess.  Of course you can untar in a temp dir
    >> or use the 't' option to look inside first, but sometimes I put too
    >> much trush in where the tarballs are going to dump and get screwed.
    >> 
    >> [1] http://www.cogit8.org/download/tarball-clean.txt

    cw> I'd rather you used Perl's built-in unlink() and rmdir()
    cw> functions; using system() might end up calling the shell,
    cw> since filenames in tarballs can have shell metacharacters in
    cw> them. They can also have spaces, which will confuse your
    cw> current script. It'll be an awful lot faster if you don't have
    cw> to fork either one or two new processes for each entry in the
    cw> tarball, too.

I'd rather people didn't use a chainsaw where a butterknife will do
just as well:

tar tzf $1 | xargs rm

will work for those dumbass tarballs where they don't make a new
directory to put their files.  There might be confusion if there are
spaces in the filenames, in which case a perl one-liner might be
called for:

perl -e 'while (<>){chomp; printf "\"%s\"\n", $_;}'

Pipe it through that and all will be well.  Other than that, rm -rf
works for me. :) TIMTOWTDI. 

Cheers,
Chris

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