How to avoid clobbering files when creating a tar archive
- by Andrew Grimm
This question notes that it is possible to overwrite files when creating a tar archive, and I'm trying to see how to avoid that situation.
Normally, I'd use file roller, but the version installed is playing up a bit (using 1.1 Gb of memory), and I'm not the system administrator.
I looked at --confirmation and --interactive, but that only asks me if I want to add file x to the archive, not whether I want to overwrite an existing file. For example,
tar --interactive -czvf innocent_text_file.txt foo*
Will ask me about each file, but is perfectly happy to overwrite innocent_text_file.txt
Is there any switch that acts like -i for cp?
Note I am asking about creating an archive, not extracting an archive.
Clarification What I'm worried about is accidentally doing something like this
tar -czvf * #Don't do this!
which would overwrite the first file listed in the glob. To avoid it, I want tar to complain if the first file mentioned already exists, like
cp -i * #Don't do this!
would check if it would cause you to overwrite an existing file.
