tar: Selecting Archive Members
1
1 6.2 Selecting Archive Members
1 =============================
1
1 "File Name arguments" specify which files in the file system 'tar'
1 operates on, when creating or adding to an archive, or which archive
1 members 'tar' operates on, when reading or deleting from an archive.
1 ⇒Operations.
1
1 To specify file names, you can include them as the last arguments on
1 the command line, as follows:
1 tar OPERATION [OPTION1 OPTION2 ...] [FILE NAME-1 FILE NAME-2 ...]
1
1 If a file name begins with dash ('-'), precede it with '--add-file'
1 option to prevent it from being treated as an option.
1
1 By default GNU 'tar' attempts to "unquote" each file or member name,
1 replacing "escape sequences" according to the following table:
1
1 Escape Replaced with
1 -----------------------------------------------------------
1 \a Audible bell (ASCII 7)
1 \b Backspace (ASCII 8)
1 \f Form feed (ASCII 12)
1 \n New line (ASCII 10)
1 \r Carriage return (ASCII 13)
1 \t Horizontal tabulation (ASCII 9)
1 \v Vertical tabulation (ASCII 11)
1 \? ASCII 127
1 \N ASCII N (N should be an octal number of
1 up to 3 digits)
1
1 A backslash followed by any other symbol is retained.
1
1 This default behavior is controlled by the following command line
1 option:
1
1 '--unquote'
1 Enable unquoting input file or member names (default).
1
1 '--no-unquote'
1 Disable unquoting input file or member names.
1
1 If you specify a directory name as a file name argument, all the
1 files in that directory are operated on by 'tar'.
1
1 If you do not specify files, 'tar' behavior differs depending on the
1 operation mode as described below:
1
1 When 'tar' is invoked with '--create' ('-c'), 'tar' will stop
1 immediately, reporting the following:
1
1 $ tar cf a.tar
1 tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive
1 Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information.
1
1 If you specify either '--list' ('-t') or '--extract' ('--get', '-x'),
1 'tar' operates on all the archive members in the archive.
1
1 If run with '--diff' option, tar will compare the archive with the
1 contents of the current working directory.
1
1 If you specify any other operation, 'tar' does nothing.
1
1 By default, 'tar' takes file names from the command line. However,
1 there are other ways to specify file or member names, or to modify the
1 manner in which 'tar' selects the files or members upon which to
1 operate. In general, these methods work both for specifying the names
1 of files and archive members.
1