Very Computer

Quote:> I know I can
> cd to /tmp and cvf on usr/local/apache2 from there, but that requires
> being in / when extracting the tar later. The people who extract these
> tars are often in their own home directory, so the files don't go
> where they need to.

Quote:> Is there anything I can do when I make a
> relative-pathed tar to make the extraction location absolute?

along with the tar file, and tell them to run that instead of extracting
directly from the tar file.

--
Kevin Rodgers

and create the tarball like this:
star -c -f foo.tar  /tmp/usr/local/apache2 -s ,/tmp,,

then your users can use their normal tar and just do a :
tar xf foo.tar

WARNING: most tar's seems to automatically remove the leading /, so
check that out.

Another option is to use CPIO to produce the archive instead, but I
don't do much cpio ...

--
carlos ** http://cgd.sdf-eu.org

You can use _existing_ tar archives with pax(1)
(if you had used a reasonable tar format w/o * options, etc.)

$ pax -r  -s ,^/tmp,, < $TARFILE

(See also the flag 'i' to even interact for each archive member.)

Commercial unix systems traditionally come with pax(1).
Unfortunately, the GNU tar people don't want to promote a GNU pax
(and AFAIK the last maintainer who wanted to isn't maintainer anymore...).
But there's a BSD pax; i just also tried the debian package.