[ale] tar restore help

[Bob's ALE Mail]

> I have a SCSI tape drive (/dev/st0) onto which I can archive all my
> files by using tar cvf /dev/st0 /

> I can list the tape's contents with tar tvf /dev/st0 and can monitor the
> drive's status with mt -f /dev/st0 status

> However when I try to extract (restore) the files with tar xvf /dev/st0
> / the tape runs and runs finally telling me that
> tar: / Not found in archive
> tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

> Am I naming the archive correctly? I tried using '/home/myname' instead
> of '/' Still didn't work.

IMHO about the only thing GNU screwed up was tar.  By default it strips the
leading slash when creating or extracting archives.

I suspect that if you look closely at your "tar -tvf /dev/st0" you will find
no leading slashes.  Thus, when extracting you must not use a leading slash.
Naturally you will want your current working dir to be "/".

In the manual is a flag to override this behavior.

Bob Toxen
bob at cavu.com http://www.cavu.com
transam at cavu.com [ALE & Linux Laptops]
Fly-By-Day Consulting, Inc.

"The bad reputation UNIX has gotten is totally undeserved, laid on by
people who don't understand, who have not gotten in there and tried
anything."  -- Jim Joyce, owner of Jim Joyce's UNIX Bookstore