How to create a compressed tar in sun solaris

The easy way, if you don't particularly need to use -C to tell tar to change to some other directory, is to simply specify the full path to the archive on the command line. Then you can be in whatever directory you prefer to create the directory structure that you want inside the archive.

The following will create the archive /var/www/file.tar.gz and put file1 from the current directory (whatever that happens to be) in it, with no in-archive path information.

tar czf /var/www/file.tar.gz file1

The path (to either the archive, the constituent files, or both) can of course also be relative. If file1 is in /tmp, you are in /var/spool and want to create the archive in /var/www, you could use something like:

tar czf ../www/file1.tar.gz /tmp/file1

There's a million variations on the theme, but this should get you started. Add the v flag if you want to see what tar actually does.

GNU tar formats suggests tar -c --format=posix or tar -c --format=pax is the only way to create a portable tar file containing path names longer than 255 characters.

The Solaris tar man page doesn't mention supporting that format, but the Solaris pax man page does.

So first, I'd try to create the archive on your Cygwin (or Linux) system using tar -c --format=posix -f dir.tar dir, and to extract it on your Solaris system using pax -r -x pax -f dir.tar, or likely just pax -r -f dir.tar.

Alternatively, if you have cpio installed on both systems, it seems like the crc format supports 1,023 character paths on both systems. That would look something like find -L dir | cpio -o -H crc > dir.cpio to create and cpio -i -d < dir.cpio to extract it.

Finally, you could try adding the -i flag to ignore directory checksum errors when extracting on Solaris, e.g. tar -x -i -f dir.tar. Checksumming problems says this can be needed if any of the file names in the tar archive are non-ASCII.

Other reading:

• Making tar archives more portable
• Comparison of tar and cpio