[NBLUG/talk] restoring from a tar file

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 12:33:35PM -0700, Robert Hayes wrote:
> OK. I blew it.
> 
> Long and the short of it is I have a tar file of 7 GB on a backup drive.
> 
> I need *1* file from that tar.
> 
> I only have 5 GB free on my / filesystem.
> 
> The tar won't open, and isn't visible through any gui interface. Is this 
> because I don't have sufficient memory on my / partition?

It's possible that the GUI interface doesn't work because the file's larger
than 2GB...  Might have to resort to the command-line...

Assuming it's not compressed:
list contents: tar tvf /full/path/to/the/file.tar 
extract one file: tar xvf /full/path/to/the/file.tar the/one/file/you/need

If it's compressed (file ends with .tgz, .tar.gz or .tar.Z)
list contents: tar tzvf /full/path/to/the/file.tar 
extract one file: tar xzvf /full/path/to/the/file.tar the/one/file/you/need

Or for bzip2 files (file ends with .tar.bz2):
list contents: tar tjvf /full/path/to/the/file.tar 
extract one file: tar xjvf /full/path/to/the/file.tar the/one/file/you/need
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder
The North Bay Linux Users Group -- http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at fn AIM: falschfreiheit