i got a 269 mb tar that is in my /home directory
its to big to be moved to / and untar

how would i go about untaring it from the /home directory but making sure it untars in the / directory

IE: instead of untaring in /home/XX/var/, i want to make sure it untars in /var/

thanks :)

I thought it had gotten it by doing a


tar czvfpP files.tar /var/XXX

so on the other server i do a

tar xzvfpP files.tar

but it still untars into the /home/XXX/var/XX instead of /var/XXX directory

Um... I hope I understand your question correctly :)

Try this: cd / ; tar xzvfp /full/path/to/tar/file

If that's doesn't work, whats the output of 'tar tvvfzp files.tar' ?