tar extract to stdout for self-extracting bin

[jbeaudry]

Can 'tar' on AIX extract to stdout? On Linux, one can 'tar -x0'. I can't seem to find the equivalent with the version that comes with AIX v5.3.

I'm putting together a self-extracting archive for my app. I'd like to automatically display a license/copyright file that is included in my archive. On Linux, I can do:

tail +$SKIP $0 | gzip -dc | tar -xO License.txt | more

and ask the user to agree before extracting the whole archive. What would be a good way to do that in AIX?

Thanks,
JP

 

[mrn]

You may be better creating a LPP package or rpm

see

http://dag.wieers.com/howto/bits/aix-lpp.php

other wise you'll have to script it

Mike

"A foolproof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble, then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant."

http://www.airport-parking-site.co.uk/

 

[jbeaudry]

Thanks for the suggestion. At this point though, I am quite satisfied with a tarball for packaging. I was just trying to get tar to extract a file to stdout so I can post our license agreement.

 

[mrn]

What about trying this

http://www.megastep.org/makeself/

Mike

"A foolproof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble, then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant."

http://www.airport-parking-site.co.uk/

 

[jbeaudry]

Thanks for the suggestion. "Makeself" is definitely a very interesting app and oh so close to what I'm looking for. I'm keeping a reference because it's sure to come in handy in the future.

Meanwhile, I've figured some of it out. As far as I can tell, there's no way to untar directly to stdout, but there is a way to untar a stream from stdin. Just replace the '-f filename' with '-f -'. I have resolved to manage my own temporary files.

Also, for whatever reason:

tail +$numLine myarchive.bin | gzip -dc

doesn't work on AIX. The output of 'cat' can be piped to 'gzip', but then you can't skip some lines.

My solution involves using 'dd' instead to output the tarball part of my archive.
e.g.

dd -if=myarchive.bin -ibs=$scriptHeaderSizeInChar -skip=1 -obs=1024 | gzip -dc | tar xvf -

I retrieve the size of the header with:

$headerLines=`awk '/^End_Of_Header_Script/ { print NR;}' myarchive.bin`
$scriptHeaderSizeInChar=`head -$headerLines myarchive.bin | wc -c | sed 's/ *//'`

You could use 'tr' instead of 'sed'.

Good times...