Linux Tar Getting Removing leading `/' from member names When Executed

Just found this: https://forum.bytemark.co.uk/viewtopic.php?pid=1937

This may help you with your question

this is what that post says:

he "Backup Ideas" page[1] has an example shell script meant to be executed as a daily cron job.




That example includes an invocation of the tar command like this:



tar cj /etc /home/ /usr/local > $PREF-$$.tar.bz2



If you run a script containing a tar invocation of that form, you'll notice that root will get an e-mail message every time the script runs, with stderr warnings from the tar command saying "Removing leading `/' from member names".



You can eliminate those tar warnings by instead invoking the tar command like this:



tar cj -C / etc home usr/local > $PREF-$$.tar.bz2



The effect will be the same except that tar will no longer emit the "Removing leading `/' from member names" warnings to stderr -- because the -C option and slash argument tell tar to cd to the root directory before tarring up whatever directories or files are specified in the rest of the arguments list.



So you'll no longer get the unnecessary mail from that cron job -- you'll only get mail if something has actually gone wrong with the job.

thank you. very helpful.

hi,
this is normal for tar, the / is a relative directory boundary in the tree structure, and tar is aware and will replace them correctly when untarring - you should test your backup anyway before relying on it, on a spare partition or pc and check it untars correctly using
#tar -xvf filename.tar
you can list the files in the tarball without untarring them as a rough check maybe if its not to big to read or your fastidious..
#tar -tvf file.tar where -t is "list", -v "verbose" -f "file" -x " extract
also read the man pages on commands you use: #man tar
cheers
stevee

try:
tar czf /tmp/myarchive.tar.gz -c / etc home

apparently the order is sometimes important :-)