TARG

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: local
Index Return to Main Contents

NAME

targ, tarl - recover files from damaged tar-format archives

SYNOPSIS

targ file ...

tarl

DESCRIPTION

Targ and tarl are used to list and recover files from a damaged tar(1) archive. They use a simplistic pattern-matching approach to identify tar header blocks. Both will cheerfully ignore all sorts of bad things about the archive (such as wrong checksums, read errors, and scraped-off magnetic surface...), up to a maximum of twenty hard errors in a row. They report on such things as apparent end-of-file. Both programs read the tar archive from standard input.

Tarl lists the file names it sees in the archive. It is particularly useful for preparing a file of names for use with targ.

Targ takes file or directory names as arguments and attempts to extract them from the archive. Targ is not willing to create directories, however, so these must be made manually beforehand if they do not already exist. Files are owned by the user, and have his default permissions.

EXAMPLE

``tarl < /dev/rmt8 > filelist'' lists all files on the tape mounted on /dev/rmt8 and places the results in ``filelist''.

``targ joe/precious < /dev/rmt0'' restores the file ``joe/precious'' from the tape mounted on /dev/rmt0. The directory ``joe'' must already exist.

HISTORY

Written by Henry Spencer, Univ. of Toronto Zoology. This software is public domain. Manual page by Chris Robertson.

BUGS

Targ should be smarter about directories and permissions.

They really should use the tar header-block checksum, instead of the slightly-arcane pattern matcher, to identify header blocks.

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 06:21:52 GMT, December 12, 2024