Re: tar: Member name contains `..'

[Brenda J. Butler]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 05:03:11AM +0000, Doofus wrote:
> tar (GNU tar) 1.13.25 
> SuSE Linux 8.2
> 
> I'm trying to extract a directory one level up from the directory the 
> archive was created in.
> 
> For each file in that upper-level directory, I get a 
> 
>       Member name contains `..'
> 
> message and no extraction.  Doesn't matter if I extract to stdout, 
> whether I'm root, or what.  I've also tried '--strip-level=1' but my 
> version of tar doesn't recognize that option, and I'm uncertain that 
> it would resolve this anyway.
> 
> I'm not trying to do anything funny.  I'm just trying to restore some 
> files.  So far, I haven't found any reference to '..' in 'info tar' 
> yet, nor the man page, nor on-line.  I'm still looking, of course.
> 
> Any help appreciated.

So, the way I understand it is:
you have a tar file of stuff like

path/to/file1
path/to/file2
path/to/another/file3

(You can tell what's in the tarfile with the -t command:
tar -tvf tarfile)

You (and the tarfile) are in directory "another" and you'd like
to extract file1 and file2 to directory "to".

If that is the case, then use the -C option:

tar -C ../../.. -xf tarfile.tar path/to/file1 path/to/file2

Or you can:

cd ../../..
tar -xf path/to/another/tarfile.tar path/to/file1 path/to/file2
> 
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