Re: [Help-tar] Overwrite options

[a]

Hello, Pavel! Thank you very much for your answer. But this is not exactly what do I want.

I want to extract one archive with backup of some files to existing directry with necessary files. If archive does not contain a file, but I have it inside existing directory, I dont want it to be removed while unpacking archive. But if archive contains new file (here I mean that everything is files - diretory, symbolic link, anything) - I want tar to overwrite it.

For example:

➜  ~ mkdir -p mydir/dir-with-files

➜  ~ ln -s /dev/null mydir/link-will-be-dir

➜  ~ touch mydir/dir-with-files/file1

➜  ~ tar -cf mybackup.tar mydir/

➜  ~ rm -f mydir/link-will-be-dir

➜ ~  mkdir -p mydir/link-will-be-dir

➜  ~ touch mydir/dir-with-files/file2 mydir/link-will-be-dir/file-should-be-deleted-after-extract-since-its-parent-dir-become-symlink

➜  ~ tar -x --some-awesome-flag mybackup.tar 

and now i want it to have:

mydir/dir-with/files contains file1 and file2

mydir/dir-will-be-link is symbolic link to /dev/null

01.11.2016, 11:04, "Pavel Raiskup" <address@hidden>:

On Tuesday, November 1, 2016 2:56:23 AM CET address@hidden wrote:

 Hello.
 I don't know if it is a bug or something like that.
 What flag should I use if I want to overwrite existing non-empty directory by
 symlink from my tar archive?

There's --recursive-unlink. But I would be careful to explicitly select
proper set of files to be extracted, rather then extract the whole archive
(there's high chance this will cause some disaster).

Documentation: info tar -n "Recursive Unlink"

Pavel

 I've tried --overwrite flag and -U, that did not
 work. Tried with tar version 1.29 and 1.28. Here is example:

 ➜ ln -s /dev/null test
 ➜ tar -cf archive.tar test
 ➜ rm -f test
 ➜ mkdir -p test/something
 ➜ tar --overwrite -xf archive.tar
 tar: test: Cannot open: File exists
 tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
 ➜ tar -U -xf archive.tar
 tar: test: Cannot unlink: Directory not empty
 tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
 ➜ rmdir test/something
 ➜ tar --overwrite -xf archive.tar
 ➜ echo $?
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