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Re: How to restore files without deleting existing



On Sun, Oct 03, 2004 at 06:52:42PM -0700, Jeff Chimene wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to resolve a tar restore issue. Using the
> newest gnu tar.
> 
> While using tar to deploy software, today I wiped
> clean my destination directory. This was somewhat of a
> surprise. The only files left in the destination were
> those present in the source archive.
> 
> The destination directory is a symlink - could this
> cause the existing files to be silently erased?
> 

I just did a test of taring via a symlink. For me, using
Sarge, it works as you think it should. My first try 
failed because one needs -h option to dereference symlink.
But the almost empty .tgz file did -not- erase anything.
Second attempt, where I actually tarred some files also
worked. 

Did you do the untar on Red Hat? That I cannot test.

> I hadn't seen this behavior under the orginal Solaris
> host system. At that time, I went from Debian Linux to
> Solaris (unknown vintage). The new sequence is Debian
> Linux to Red Hat Linux.
> 
> In both environments, I create the archive as tar -czf
> archive.tar.gz source/
> Under Solaris I restored using a command like gzip
> archive.tar.gz | tar df -
> 
> In the new environment I thought I could just tar -xzf
> archive.tar.gz Apparently, this isn't the case...
> 
> Thanks for your help,
> Jeff Chimene
> 

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon@mesanetworks.net



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