IT From All Angles

I have been working on creating a bunch of debootstrap images lately, and I ended up doing a whole bunch of work creating tarballs and did it wrong.  So I took the time to sort out an easy way to fix them all with two commands.

The Core of My Problem

So what started this is I forgot to “stand” in the directory I was archiving, as such all of my images ended up having a top level directory named lenny32 (insert appropriate distribution and architecture here) which isn’t very helpful when you are extracting it to the root of a file system.

Here is the command I used to originally create my archive.

# tar -czf lenny32.tgz lenny32/

Here is the command I should have used.

# tar -czf lenny32.tgz -C lenny32/ .

The -C switch tells tar to cd into the directory before performing the archive.

Now before we get started lets make sure that you are have 2 separate working directories, one for .tgz files and one for the source files.

Extracting All of the Archives

So the first part of the process is re-extracting all of the archives, you can optionally just re-archive your original source files provided that they are still accessible.  This assumes that you have created an unfixed directory, in which we will be locating our source files.

# for a in `ls -l *.tgz`; do echo -n $a; tar -xzf $a -C unfixed; echo "     done."; done

Recreating All of the Archives

Now since we have extracted everything we end up with a directory which holds a bunch of subdirectories for each of our archives.  Now we will turn each directory into its own archive.  Make sure there are no extra directories in here.

# for a in `ls`; do echo -n $a; tar -czf $a.tgz -C $a .; echo "      done."; done

Now once you have done this you will have your source files in the same directory as your fixed tarballs.  This can be resolved by doing a move.

# mv *.tgz ../fixed

There you go.  This is really rather simple, but it isn’t something I use frequently so I wanted to write it down.  Now when you extract one of these archives make sure you are “standing” in an empty directory OR use the -C option to have tar stand in that empty directory for you, otherwise you will dirty up that directory.

# tar -xzf lenny32.tgz -C lenny32/

Enjoy!

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