Wildcard Characters in Filenames

--- This text was originally contributed to the AMANDA-FAQ-O-Matic by [email protected]. ---

If you have backed up files with shell metacharacters as part of the filename, and you are using Gnu tar as part of your Amanda backup process, you may notice that you can no longer pull the files out. The symptoms are:

 amrecover> add *asid=\[101\]*
 Added /joe_asid=[101].gz
 amrecover> extract
 Extracting files using tape drive /dev/nst0 on  host xyz.com.
 The following tapes are needed: big1
 Restoring files into directory /tmp
 Continue? [Y/n]: y
 Load tape big1 now
 Continue? [Y/n]: y
 tar: ./joe_asid=[101].gz: Not found in archive
 tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

The solution can be one of a number of things:

1. Try to make Gnu tar treat shell metacharacters (like [ and ] and *) as normal characters. I'm not sure this is possible, and I haven't tried.

2. Edit the amrecover source code to make it escape shell metacharacters.

3. Use amrestore instead of amrecover so that you can escape the filenames you're interested in, eg:

 $ mt -f /dev/nst0 rewind
 $ amrestore -p /dev/nst0 \
    hostname.myowncompany.com \
    /backed/up/directory | tar -xvf - '*\[101\]*'

Or more specifically, the value you could pass to Gnu tar would be:

 'joe_asid\[101\].gz'