Is it possible to remove all files that start with certain name from a compressed tarball without extracting and recreating the archive again?
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Is it possible to remove all files that start with certain name from a compressed tarball without extracting and recreating the archive again?
The tar file format is a streaming format, so it would be possible to do this by reading the old file, skipping over the unwanted file(s), and copying all the data you want to keep to a new tar file. If the tar file is also compressed (eg.
.tar.gz), then you would have to uncompress, filter, recompress, and write.I don’t know of any existing tools to do this, but it should be reasonably straightforward using the Python
tarfilemodule, for example.