I needed to copy the contents of one directory belonging to a user from one Linux system to another. While logged into her account on the source system, I created a tar file, aka a "tarball", of the directory with the command
tar -cvf game.tar game to copy the contents of her "game"
directory and all of its subdirectories to the tar file. The tar file was about
20 MB in size, so I compressed it with the
gzip
command gzip game.tar resulting in a game.tar.gz file about 5 MB
in size, which I transferred to the destination system. While logged
into her account on the destination system, I uncompressed the .gz file
with gunzip game.tar.gz and then attempted to extract the
contents of the tar file into the same directory on the destination system as
on the source system. The directory already existed on the destination server
because I had many months ago copied everything in her home directory from the
source to the destination system. When I ran the command tar -xvf
game.tar to extract the contents of the tar file, I saw files
extracted, but I also saw several "Cannot open: File exists" lines
in the output from the command, which terminated prematurely with the
following lines:game/Update tar: game/Update: Cannot open: File exists game/FAQ tar: game/FAQ: Cannot open: File exists game/CONVERT.22 tar: game/CONVERT.22: Cannot open: File exists game/BETA tar: game/BETA: Cannot open: File exists tar: game: Cannot utime: Operation not permitted tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
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