Open System Services Shell and Utilities Reference Manual (G06.25+, H06.03+)

tar(1) OSS Shell and Utilities Reference Manual
l Tells tar to generate an error message if it cannot resolve all the links to the files
archived. If this flag is not specified, no error messages are generated.
m Tells tar not to restore the modification times. The modification time assigned will be
the time of extraction, which is always the case with symbolic links.
o Is provided for backward compatibility. Specify this
flag if the archive will be restored
on a system with an earlier version of tar.
On output, tar normally places information specifying owner and modes of directories
in the archive file. Earlier versions of tar, when encountering this information, give an
error message of the form:
name/: cannot create
The o flag suppresses the directory information. It also prevents archiving of special
files and FIFOs that earlier versions of tar would not be able to extract properly.
(Although anyone can archive special files, only a user who has appropriate privileges
can extract them from the archive files.)
When o is used for reading, it causes the extracted file to take on the user ID and group
ID (UID and GID) of the user running the program, rather than those of the archive file.
This is the default action for the ordinary user.
v Makes tar display progress messages containing the name of each file it processes pre-
ceded by the flag letter. When the v flag is omitted, tar does not produce progress mes-
sages.
When used with the required_flag value of t, the v (verbose) flag gives more informa-
tion about the archive entries than just their names.
w Causes tar to display the action to be taken followed by the name of the file, and then
to wait for the user’s confirmation.
If the user responds with a word beginning with y, or the locale’s equivalent of a y, the
action is performed. If any other response is given, the action is not performed.
All flags must be specified together (with no separating spaces). For all flags that require
operand values, the operands must follow the string of flags and be in the same order as the
corresponding flags. For example, tar -cbf n file . and tar -cfb file n |. both use correct ordering,
while tar -cbf file n . specifies a filename where a blocking factor is expected.
DESCRIPTION
The tar utility is used to save and restore data from traditional format tar archives.
The actions of the tar command are controlled by a string containing one required flag and one
or more optional flags. Most operands to tar are filenames or directory names specifying which
files to dump or restore. In all cases, appearance of a directory name refers to the files and (recur-
sively) subdirectories of that directory.
Environment Variables
The LC_MESSAGES variable determines the locale’s equivalent of y or n (for yes/no user
responses).
This command supports the use of the LANG, LC_ALL, LC_COLLATE, LC_CTYPE,
LC_MESSAGES, LC_TIME, NLSPATH, and TZ environment variables.
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