relative pathname question!

[0000-Mike Wolfe0000]

In article <5103 at rpp386.UUCP> jfh at rpp386.UUCP (The Beach Bum) writes:
>In article <5762 at super.upenn.edu> spolsky at eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (Joel Spolsky) writes:
>>As far as I can tell, there is NO way to extract tar files with
>>absolute pathnames anywhere except their original positions.
>
>sure is, and a damned clever one at that.  its called "sub-system root".
>look up chroot(2) in your unix manual.

Be forewarned (or forearmed :-), When using chroot you change the root dir
for ALL path searches. So when tar calls mkdir (on my old 5.0 system) it
assumes that /bin/mkdir is where it's at. This means that you have to create
some kind of link/copy of mkdir and tar in the new "tree". On 5.3 systems
it becomes even more of a bugger, shared lib's can't be accessed. I assume
this can be worked around in a similar fashion but I was too grossed
out to try, YECH!

Chroot is a kludge! But it does have a limited usefulness in allowing you
to run SOME software on floppy without installing it first.

There is a public domain tar that I believe can be used to extract absolute
path names. This is a much better way than the obsolete chroot.

----
Mike Wolfe
Paradyne Corporation,  Mail stop LF-207   DOMAIN   wolfe at pdn.UUCP
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