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H2ONaCl
Asked: 2012-05-01 03:55:28 +0800 CST

Is there a way to `tar` extract without clobbering

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Is there a way to tar extract without clobbering?

I am installing 12.04 and want to restore my data from 10.10. Anything 12.04 specific I would like to keep, that is I do not want the tar'd 10.10 version to be extracted. If I do a general restore such files as .bashrc will be clobbered. Is there a way to avoid this?

Edit: I would note that a booted 12.04 ISO disk image allows an upgrade from 10.10 (or whatever) and it offers to keep old data. I tried this but it complained some applications might be left broken after the upgrade. I decided to just reboot and do a clean install.

tar

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I have difficulty understanding what you want but if you made a tar file of your whole system I believe you made a very large tar file that has not a real purpose unless you completely restore the tar file. If you wanted to save your own documents you should have made a backup of those documents and nothing else.

    After saying that tar has several nifty options ...

    --keep-old-files

    This will not overwrite existing files.

    --keep-newer-files

    This will keep all files that have a newer timestamp as is.

    --no-overwrite-dir

    This will leave the metadata of an existing directory as is.

    A manual for tar can be found here.

    But I would advice extracting the tar file on another medium and manually restore those files. It is the safest method.

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  2. From tar(1):

     -k, --keep-old-files
       don't replace existing files when extracting

    Seems clear to me. If files in the tarball are stored relatively to your old homedir:

    tar xvkf backup.tar.gz -C ~
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