On Sat, 2005-09-03 at 11:05, Todd Cary wrote:

Basic tar question:

I have created a ar file with

tar -prvf /tmp/ib_backup.tar /opt/interbase/data/*

The file has been copied to another box and I want to untar the file into

/opt/interbase/data/

I am not sure about the syntax; how to specify where I want the data to be placed.

Here is my start of the command:

tar -xvf /tmp/ib_backup.tar #The tar file is in /tmp

You created the file with the full path starting from /. Gnutar will default to removing the leading / (to prevent some really stupid things from happening...) and installs under your current directory. So, if you want it back under the same path, cd to / before you extract. If you aren't sure, look at the contents with 'tar -t' first to see how the paths look relative to your current directory. There are also options to tar to keep the leading / or to change directories before doing an operation but I think it is less confusing to just cd to the right place before running the command.