extracting tar files with absolute pathnames relatively

[Leslie Mikesell]

In article <1501 at cfa205.cfa250.harvard.edu> todd at cfa250.harvard.edu (Todd Karakashian) writes:

>I am in posession of tapes containing tarfiles with absolute
>pathnames.  What I would like to do is to extract these files into a
>different tree structure than they were tarred from.

GNUtar and PAX (both free but not public domain) will do this.  GNUtar
just strips the leading / if present, PAX lets you do a regex substitution
on the pathname.
Otherwise you have to set up a fake environment and chroot into it.

Les Mikesell