Linux – Undo tar file extraction mess

bashlinuxtarundo

I just untar'd an archive that produced a mess of files into my tidy directory. For example:

user@comp:~/tidy$ tar xvf myarchive.tar
file1
file2
dir1/
dir1/file1
dir1/subdir1/
dir1/subdir1/file1
dir2/
dir2/file1
...

I was expecting that the tar file would have been organized in a single folder (i.e., myarchive/), but it wasn't! Now I have some 190 files and directories that have digitally barfed in what was an organized directory. These untar'd files need to be cleaned up.

Is there any way to "undo" this and delete the files and directories that were extracted from this archive?

Thanks for the excellent answers below. In summary, here is what works with two steps (1) delete files, and (2) delete empty directory structure in reverse packing order (to delete outer directories first):

tar tf myarchive.tar | xargs -d'\n' rm
tar tf myarchive.tar | tac | xargs -d'\n' rmdir

And safer yet, to preview a dry-run of the commands by appending echo after xargs.

Best Answer

tar tf archive.tar

will list the contents line by line.

This can be piped to xargs directly, but beware: do the deletion very carefully. You don't want to just rm -r everything that tar tf tells you, since it might include directories that were not empty before unpacking!

You could do

tar tf archive.tar | xargs -d'\n' rm -v
tar tf archive.tar | sort -r | xargs -d'\n' rmdir -v

to first remove all files that were in the archive, and then the directories that are left empty.

sort -r (glennjackman suggested tac instead of sort -r in the comments to the accepted answer, which also works since tar's output is regular enough) is needed to delete the deepest directories first; otherwise a case where dir1 contains a single empty directory dir2 will leave dir1 after the rmdir pass, since it was not empty before dir2 was removed.

This will generate a lot of 

rm: cannot remove `dir/': Is a directory

and

rmdir: failed to remove `dir/': Directory not empty
rmdir: failed to remove `file': Not a directory

Shut this up with 2>/dev/null if it annoys you, but I'd prefer to keep as much information on the process as possible.

And don't do it until you are sure that you match the right files. And perhaps try rm -i to confirm everything. And have backups, eat your breakfast, brush your teeth, etc.

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