Re: afio batch operation

["Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net>]

Hi,

> I have a CD that was written by mondorescue and it has hundreds of files in
> the form
> <number>.afio.bz2.

They must be quite small if hundreds of them fit on a CD.


> Can someone suggest a simple command line to extract the hundreds of files
> and write/merge them into a single directory tree?

The name suffix .bz2 could mean that afio used -Z -P bzip2 when packing up
the archives, or that the completed afio archive files were compressed
by bzip2. This matters, because afio -Z compresses individual files in
the archive, whereas a bzip2 run on the archive stream compresses the
whole archive. (This differs from the situation with tar -z)

If the archive files were made with afio -Z, then program "file" should say
about them

  <name>: ASCII cpio archive (pre-SVR4 or odc)

An afio achive post-compressed by bzip2 should yield

  <name>: bzip2 compressed data, ...

According shell runs for inspection would then be

  afio -tv NNN.afio.bz2

or

  bunzip2 < NNN.afio.bz2 | afio -tv -

For a combined list of all file paths in the archives i would run

  for i in *.afio.bz2
  do
    # One of:
    #   afio -tv "$i"
    #   bunzip2 < "$i" | afio -tv -
  done >/tmp/all_afio_paths 2>&1

Then study file /tmp/all_afio_paths to learn about the path situation.

If all paths are relative, i.e. with no leading "/", then create a new
directory at a suitable place on the hard disk. Like:

  archive_dir=/mnt/iso
  unpack_dir="$HOME"/all_afio_files

  mkdir "$unpack_dir"
  cd "$unpack_dir"

Then unpack the archive files:

  for i in "$archive_dir"/*.afio.bz2
  do
    # One of:
    #   afio -ivZ -P bzip2
    #   bunzip2 < "$i" | afio -iv -
  done

If there are absolute paths in the afio archives, then you might need chroot
to force the unpacking to your $unpack_dir.

Consider to practive with a single archive file first.
Try to find one which contains no old copies of important files.


Have a nice day :)

Thomas