Pipelining with tar

[huntreilly25]

Hello,
I am currently interning at a place and my job is to essentially learn UNIX. My supervisor gives me problems here and there to help guide me with my learning but for the most part I'm doing this all by self-teaching myself. Needless to say I have run into a few obstacles...for instance

-Create a *one* line command that, using tar, will collect the full /usr/local directory (you need to run this as root again) and copy the whole /usr/local structure under /opt
For example /usr/local/bin/hello will become /opt/local/bin/hello, etc.

I want this as follows:
1. /usr/local is collected by tar, but the output of this tar command is its stdout.
2. what you get from the previous stdout, you compress with gzip and send it to stdout again
3. get this output and decompress with gzip.
4. get this output and pipe to tar in a way that will extract the tree under /opt.

If anyone knows how I could go about doing this, please let me know, or at the very least point me in the right direction. What I've got so far (which could be completely wrong) is:

tar cvf - usr/local/ | gzip -c - | gunzip -c - | tar xvf -

in theory I feel like this should work (except for extracting the tree under /opt...i'm kinda stuck there) So if anyone knows or has a solution it would be greatly appreciated! and maybe help me out by explaining what is involve and maybe where I went wrong.

Thanks

[hazel]

You've got the basic idea, though I don't think you need the zip-unzip section in the middle. Just tar and untar. If you look up the man page for tar you'll see an option to change directories so that the untar operation gets done in /opt.. But I'm not going to tell you what it is.

We have a house rule on this forum that we don't do people's homework for them because that would be pointless, but most of us are glad to give a helping hand to someone who's obviously tried.

[alf55]

Close but what you will get is "/opt/usr/local/bin/hello" rather than "/opt/local/bin/hello".

Hint:
Look at the use of "(" and ")" and compound statements. or the use of ssh rather than the '()".

[huntreilly25]

Thanks for the help...and yeah I understand the whole not doing other people's homework for them It definitely helps me to learn and figure things out myself...I just sometimes need a push in the right direction

I think I managed to figure it out...

tar cvf - usr/local/ | gzip -c - | gunzip -c - | tar -C opt/ -xvf -

and yeah, the compress just to uncompress right away definitely seems unnecessary but my supervisor said we will be expanding on that later so hopefully it'll all make sense, I think he just wanted me to get the principles down. I have a feeling it has to do with compressing the file for transfer through ssh and uncompressing once its on the other side...

Thanks again