Re: Specifying tmp for tar

On Fri, 2007-08-31 at 23:53 +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
On 31/08/2007, Rick Stevens <rstevens@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 2007-08-31 at 23:18 +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
I have a 2 GB bz2 archive that unzips to over 10 GB (wikipedia dump).
Although I have over 50 GB free in /home, / has only about 8 GB free.
Thus, as tar uses /tmp, the / filesystem fills up and I cannot
continue. How can I specify a tmp directory for tar in my home
directory? Note that man tar makes no mention of a tmp option.

Boot in single user mode, Then as root:

# mkdir /home/tmp
# chmod 777 /home/tmp
# mv /tmp /tmp-old
# ln -s /home/tmp /tmp
# cp -a /tmp-old/* /tmp

That creates a /home/tmp directory, allows everyone access, renames the
old /tmp to /tmp-old, symlinks /home/tmp to /tmp, then copies everything
that was in the old /tmp to the new one. Once that's done, you can
reboot and all references to /tmp will now access /home/tmp.

Thanks, Rick, I'll try that. I can then simply erase the symlink? I
know that "rm /tmp" will not erase the symlink, rather the content of
/home/tmp so how can I remove it afterwards? Thanks.

No, "rm /tmp" will remove the symlink. If you want to revert to the
original /tmp, reboot in single user mode again and as root:

# cp -a /tmp/* /tmp-old
# rm -f /tmp
# mv /tmp-old /tmp

which will copy any changes from /home/tmp (/tmp) to the original /tmp
directory, then deletes the symlink and renames /tmp-old to /tmp.

Also, as a learning experience, is there a way a user without root
access could unpack the tar? It's not a problem, but I'd like to
learn. Thanks.

If you were doing

bunzip2 name-of-tar.bz2
tar xf name-of-tar

or even

bzcat name-of-tar.bz2 | tar xf -

then you're going to use /tmp. Do it all in one command:

tar xJf name-of-tar.bz2

to unzip and untar the thing. Should do it all in the current
directory.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Principal Engineer rstevens@xxxxxxxxxxxx -
- CDN Systems, Internap, Inc. http://www.internap.com -
- -
- Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else. -
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