[Fedora] Re: Specifying tmp for tar

[Ashley M. Kirchner]

Rick Stevens 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

    Doesn't tar only use tmp because it has to uncompress the file 
first?  If that's the case, why not uncompress the file first with bzip2 
somewhere on the file system that actually has space, and then run tar 
to extract the files?  In essence he would be renaming his file to 
archive.tar.bz2, run bunzip2 against it, and then run tar against the 
archive.tar...

    bzip uses whatever the current path is to compress or decompress a 
file, so /tmp wouldn't play a part here.

    That's my theory at least.  The last time I had to uncompress a 
large archive (over 100GiB in size), that's what I did and it worked 
flawlessly.  Worst case, you can specify the -s option to bunzip2 which 
will cause bzip to use even less memory (and /tmp if he's really low on 
memory) and still get the file uncompressed.

    -- A


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H | It's not a bug - it's an undocumented feature.
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