CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashtar
Gigline
Gigline

Reputation: 297

How can I extract a long list of tarballs via STDIN?

I'm copying bunch of .tar backups of user home directories to a new server and have the tarballs already copied from the old server to the new server.

For Example;

[[email protected] /home]# ls /home |grep tar
returns:
user1.tar
user2.tar
user3.tar
[etc]

But making things a little trickier, the tarballs were created from the root directory on the original server so a default extraction has 'home' in the default path e.g.;

[[email protected] /home]# tar -xvf user1.tar

extracts to a new home directory relative to where your running the command and places the extracted files at the path

/home/home/user1

The closest I believe I have come to what's required (with a few different variations);

[[email protected] /]# ls /home |grep tar |tar -xvf -

returns;

tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

Now I realize there's a lot of workarounds for each of the different pieces, but if I'm going to grow up to be a super-cool sysadmin like my friends, I should probably know super-cool tricks like this.

Thanks!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 299

Answers (1)

Karoly Horvath
Karoly Horvath

Reputation: 96266

tar expects a tar file on stdin, not a list of filenames.

Process each file separately:

ls *.tar | xargs -n 1 tar xvf

or

for file in *.tar; do tar xvf $file; done

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions