SUMMARY: Question on tar + another question

Thanks to everyone who took time to respond to my question on stripping the leading "/" from a tar extract.  Consensus is that it is not possible with standard tar, but is the default with GNUtar (which is what I used).  Biggest thing I learned was to never use absolute paths when creating tape archives...  Other suggestions were to use 'chroot' to re-direct output, and the 'pax' command (which I could not get to work).

This leads to a new question...why does gnutar not want to release the tape drive?  I left it sit for over an hour hoping that it would finish reading the rest of the tape on it's own and return to a command prompt.  I finally had to control C out of it.  Has anyone else seen this behavior with gnutar?

Following are typical of the responses I received:

The best way is to use relative pathnames when creating the tar archive
in the first place.
Both Joerg Schilling's "star" and GNU tar ignore leading slashes by
default; you could use one of those.
*
I "think" gnutar will allow you to do what you want:
http://www.sunfreeware.com/
select Sparc/Solaris 7 and scroll down to tar 1.13.19
*
Either use GNU tar, or do a chroot(1M).
GNU tar is good to have around in any case, but if you can't get it
quickly, the chroot(1M) man page has a "de-absolute tar path"
example.
*
You may want to look at pax(1) instead. Take a look at the -i and -s
options for a start.
*
pax -r -s '!/path_on_tape/filename!newpath/newfilename!' \
	-f /dev/rmt/0 /path_on_tape/filename
Type "man pax" for more details.
*
pax -r -f foo.tar  -s ';oldpath;newpath;'  /oldpath/fileyouwant
If all you need is to strip the leading /, 
    pax -r -f /dev/rmt/0 -s ';//*;;' /path_on_tape/filename
*









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