I use my server to serve videos that are very large. A few weeks ago, my server was hacked, and I had to do a reinstall. I specifically asked my provider to keep the files. The tech who did the resinstall tar'd and zipped the /home directory.

The server is now back online. However, the tar files(unzipped) is about 6.9GB. I tried untar-ing it, but after waiting for 20 minutes, my /home directory was filled, and I think because of this, some files were truncated.

I was hoping to be able to extract individual files out to another partition, maybe /usr temporarily. But I don't know what the command for extracting only some files is. I tried to do a tar --list, but it just hangs there for 5 minutes, and I had to kill it. I know also that there are a few large files in the tar file that I don't need, but I don't know how to delete them from the tarball.(nor do I know their names, since tar --list doesn't work).

My machine is fairly low-end, its a celeron 800 with 128MB of RAM. What would be your recommendation to this problem?

Here is the df output without all the files extracted(but with the large tar file)

------------
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda8 256667 196019 47396 81% /
/dev/hda1 54416 14585 37022 29% /boot
/dev/hda6 12871596 7272012 4945744 60% /home
/dev/hda5 12871596 821464 11396292 7% /usr
/dev/hda7 256667 33005 210410 14% /var
------------

and here is the tar file itself with ls -lhs,

------------
7.0G -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6.9G Feb 27 14:37 home.tar
------------

Thanks,

Peter

To get a listing of what's in the tar you can do:

tar -tvf home.tar

That will split back everything to your screen. You could also do:

tar -tvf home.tar > home.tar.txt

That will take the output and put it in home.tar.txt

If you have certain files you want to extact, try:

tar -xvf home.tar /extact/path/in/the/tar/file-needed

Try "man tar" on your server to get more details on the tar command.


Frank

Thanks Frank.

Upon examining the output, I found that most of the files are not needed. If I want to expand a certain directory in the tar file, can I use wildcard? Or do I have to expand the files individually?

Thanks,

Peter

A wild card should work, but your milage will vary ;) I've had different amounts of luck depending on the exact tar program that has been installed (i.e. RH vs GNU etc.).

Frank

Thank you. Unfortunately wildcard did not work for me. It is a pain to individually extract the files, since each execution takes about 5 minutes. (Think of the time I will be wasting for the 30 or so files).

Congradulation also on your would-be 500th post.

Peter

Do a "man tar" and let me know if it's gnu tar.

Frank

This is the part of the output:

tar - The GNU version of the tar archiving utility

Peter

Your problem is probably that you're trying to use a wildcard. To extract a directory, you don't need a wildcard, just type the name of the directory.

tar -xvf file.tar foo/bar/dir

sample output:

foo/bar/dir/
foo/bar/dir/file1.txt
foo/bar/dir/file2.txt

It turns out wildcard does work. I must have been confused by my ssh client's screen display.

Thanks for all you help!

Peter