VeriTAR 0.3.0

VeriTAR is a software that can verify checksums of files within a TAR archive.

Creation of the TAR archive and the MD5 sums file

In the following example it is assumed that the files to backup reside in the myfiles/ subdirectory, the name of the tar archive will be mybackup.tar and the name of the file containing the md5sums will be mybackup.md5.

$ tar -cvpf mybackup.tar myfiles/
| xargs -I '{}' sh -c "test -f '{}' && md5sum '{}'"
| tee mybackup.md5

Some notes:

You can use any tar switch for the creation of the archive except -C. If you need to change to another directory, do it using cd or else no md5 sums will be recorded.

Make sure that you include the -v (–verbose) switch when invoking tar, as the paths need to be printed to stdout in order to be processed by xargs.
In the xargs statement, the -I ‘{}’ part indicates that the '{}' string will be replaced by the path that is passed to xargs through the pipe.

The sh -c “test -f ‘{}’ && md5sum ‘{}’” does two things: tests if the path ('{}') is a file and calculates the md5 sum for it.

In the last part, tee is used in order to print the md5sum to the stdout and also to the mybackup.md5 file.

When this operation ends, you will end up with two files: mybackup.tar and mybackup.md5.

Usage:

veritar [options] tar_archive checksum_file

checksum_file format: 'md5sum path'

Options:

--version show program's version number and exit
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-v, --verbose Print all messages. Cannot be used with -q.
-q, --quiet Only checksum errors will be printed. Warnings are
suppressed. Cannot be used with -v.
-n, --no-warn Warnings are suppressed. Note that using this switch together
with -q has absolutely no effect, since -q suppresses
warnings anyway.

What's New in This Release:

· Code redesign. Translation of TAR member types.
· Various minor fixes.
· Command line options for message detail.
· The program now processes only TAR members that are 'regular files'.
· Counters and summary, a timer, an installation script, and a launch script have been added.



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