relative pathname question!

[Anthony A. Datri]

In article <5762 at super.upenn.edu> spolsky at eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (Joel Spolsky) writes:
>In article <1670003 at hpcilzb.HP.COM> tedj at hpcilzb.HP.COM (Ted Johnson) writes:
>As far as I can tell, there is NO way to extract tar files with
>absolute pathnames anywhere except their original positions.

  I tried for a year or two to do that, then gave up.  When I make a tar tape
I always explicitly give it a ./foo pathname.  A month or so ago one of my
users (a boss-type, actually) came to me with a tape written by a company we
do work with, and asked me to read it.  Lo and behold!  /usr2/sally/...  on
the tape!  I felt like assaulting the representative of that company who was
here with my df32 platter, but I cooled off.  I just made a /usr2 that was
a symbolic link to where I wanted it to go and everything was okay.  Things
could have been worse because there used to be a user "sally".  Reminds me
of my days back at CMU when a user would come up with a tape they wanted to
read.

me:   What density is the tape?
user: Huh?
me:   What format is the tape?
user: Huh?
me:   Allright, what kind of computer is the tape from?
user: Huh?


(but I digress..)



-- 
@disclaimer(Any concepts or opinions above are entirely mine, not those of my
	    employer, my GIGI, or my 11/34)
beak is								  beak is not
Anthony A. Datri,SysAdmin,StepstoneCorporation,stpstn!aad