Comments on: Copy files and directories recursively with tar

By: Janis

Janis — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 09:16:00 +0000

Beware, don’t use this approach in a script!
It could fail and if you just check return codes
you won’t even notice.

tar cf – * | ( cd /target; tar xfp -)

What if cd /target; fails? (maybe because it does not exist)
Tar will try to copy the files on themselves. That fails but
nevertheless I get a return code of 0 in my test.

Better use this (and you will get return code 1):
tar cf – * | ( cd /target && tar xfp -)
Or use the -C option as an alternative.

By: Karen

Karen — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 10:03:00 +0000

Except -C is not a very standard option on tar. The ‘tar’ command in Solaris does not accept this, and I doubt it would be accepted on AIX or HP-UX either.

By: Soumen78

Soumen78 — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 10:53:00 +0000

I have some link in my src area and these links _could_ be broken under certain circumstances and I want to ignore such error and proceed. How do I pass “–ignore-failed-read” in “tar cfhi – . | ( tar -C ~/releases/tmp_new xpf – )”?

By: Mikel Stous

Mikel Stous — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:17:00 +0000

I’ve usually seen it with B for reassembling short reads into full records (reading 4.2BSD pipes). In other words, rightsize the blocks for the filesystem.

tar cf – * | ( cd /target; tar xfBp -)

By: x

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 22:37:00 +0000

Better is
tar cf – . | tar -C /target -xpf -