Tarball Cleaner

[Elihu]

Category:

helper script

Description:

Call this with a tarball to remove the contents of the tarball. Very useful if the tarball dumps in the current directory.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# Removes files by using the tarball to get the files
# by Rob Hudson (02012000)

my $tarball = $ARGV[0] if ($ARGV[0] ne '') || die "Must specify a file
+.\n";
my @files;
my @dirs;

# If file ends in .gz or .tgz, assume is gzipped
# Else assume it is a plain tar file
if ($tarball =~ m/\.t?gz$/) {
        @files = `tar -tzf $tarball`;
}
else {
        @files = `tar -tf $tarball`;
}

# Removes files.  If it ends with '/', then its a directory
# Push those into the directory array and move on.
foreach $file (@files) {
        chomp $file;
        if ($file =~ m!.*/$!) {
                push @dirs, $file;
                next;
        }
        print "Removing file: $file\n";
        system ("rm -f $file");
}

# Using pop here to go backwards thru the array since directories
# can be nested.
while ($dir = pop(@dirs)) {
        print "Removing directory: $dir\n";
        system ("rmdir $dir");
}

[KM]

You may want to consider adding some checks in here to make sure this can't be exploited. This should use -T and the incomming arguments should be laundered (see Untaint.pm, and perlsec). By laundering the incomming arg, you can make sure that the incomming file has a .tar/.gz extention, and ends there. You wouldn't want someone passing an arg of 'foo.tar.gz; echo <badness> > trojan' or 'foo.tar.gz; rm -rf ./'
I know it isn't a CGI, but making it somewhat safe is a good idea.

Just a thought.

Cheers,
KM

[Anonymous Monk]

Some tarballs dont create new directories.
This can be bad news.

I recently did a rm -rf `tar tvfz blah.tgz` on a tarball that had contained ./ and had made a mess in the cwd

Luckily, the "v" saved me, as I assume rm -rf ./ would be pretty bad.

In my haste, I have not considered how your code would handle this, but it might be good to check.

[deprecated]

Is there a reason Archive::Tar was not used in this case? I am working on a project with it (code to follow, maybe even this evening), and it seems pretty straightforward (if a little braindead), and doesnt require the use of `` and the like...

update: that code is here.

dep

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