GNU tar 1.34: 4.2.6 Comparing Archive Members with the File System
[ << ] | [ < ] | [ Up ] | [ > ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
4.2.6 Comparing Archive Members with the File System
The ‘--compare
’ (‘-d
’), or ‘--diff
’ operation compares specified archive members against files with the same names, and then reports differences in file size, mode, owner, modification date and contents. You should only specify archive member names, not file names. If you do not name any members, then tar
will compare the entire archive. If a file is represented in the archive but does not exist in the file system, tar
reports a difference.
You have to specify the record size of the archive when modifying an archive with a non-default record size.
tar
ignores files in the file system that do not have corresponding members in the archive.
The following example compares the archive members ‘rock’, ‘blues’ and ‘funk’ in the archive ‘bluesrock.tar’ with files of the same name in the file system. (Note that there is no file, ‘funk’; tar
will report an error message.)
$ tar --compare --file=bluesrock.tar rock blues funk rock blues tar: funk not found in archive
The spirit behind the ‘--compare
’ (‘--diff
’, ‘-d
’) option is to check whether the archive represents the current state of files on disk, more than validating the integrity of the archive media. For this latter goal, see Verifying Data as It is Stored.
[ << ] | [ < ] | [ Up ] | [ > ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
This document was generated on March 24, 2021 using texi2html 5.0.