Tar a file with a different name

filenamestar

To make my environment deployable, I occasionally tar up some handy files and scripts:

tar -czvf env.tgz .vimrc .vim/ bin/lsl bin/s

I would like to add .bashrc to the mix, but I have some sensitive information in there so I maintain .bashrc-deploy which I can then simply rename once the tarball is on the new server. However, I would really like to have the tarball have the correct name .bashrc from the get-go so that I would not have to rename. I considered writing a script which would temporarily rename the files and make the tarball, like so:

#!/bin/bash
mv .bashrc .bashrc-real
mv .bashrc-deploy .bashrc
tar -czvf env.tgz .bashrc .vimrc .vim/ bin/lsl bin/s
mv .bashrc .bashrc-deploy
mv .bashrc-real .bashrc

However, does tar have any internal way of storing someFile with the name anotherName in the tarball?

Best Answer

One way you could do this is a chainload.

In .bashrc:

#!/bin/bash

# ...
# Non-private information
# ...

[[ -r ~/.bashrc-private ]] && . ~/.bashrc-private

Then put (only) your private stuff in ~/.bashrc-private and everything else in ~/.bashrc. Then just deploy ~/.bashrc.

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Bash scripting – read tarball from stdin

The cat > file should work no matter when you call it, as long as you didn't read from it before and "use up" the input stream, or close the file descriptor, which you don't. This is a completely legal and normal command and it works, at least on my side.

Tar extract into directory with same base name

With gnu tar, you could use --xform (or --transform) to prepend /prefix/ to each file name:

tar -xf myArchive.tar.gz --xform='s|^|myArchive/|S'

note there's no leading / in prefix/ and the sed expression ends with S to exclude symbolic link targets from file name transformations.
To test it (dry-run):

tar -tf myArchive.tar.gz --xform='s|^|myArchive/|S' --verbose --show-transformed-names

To get you started, here's a very simplistic script that you could invoke as extract <file>:

STRIP=${1%.*}                                #strip last suffix
NAME=${STRIP%.tar}                           #strip .tar suffix, if present
tar -xf "$1" --xform="s|^|$NAME/|S"          #run command

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