3.8 Asking for Confirmation During Operations

Typically, tar carries out a command without stopping for further instructions. In some situations however, you may want to exclude some files and archive members from the operation (for instance if disk or storage space is tight). You can do this by excluding certain files automatically (see Choosing), or by performing an operation interactively, using the --interactive (-w) option. tar also accepts --confirmation for this option.

When the --interactive (-w) option is specified, before reading, writing, or deleting files, tar first prints a message for each such file, telling what operation it intends to take, then asks for confirmation on the terminal. The actions which require confirmation include adding a file to the archive, extracting a file from the archive, deleting a file from the archive, and deleting a file from disk. To confirm the action, you must type a line of input beginning with ‘y’. If your input line begins with anything other than ‘y’, tar skips that file.

If tar is reading the archive from the standard input, tar opens the file /dev/tty to support the interactive communications.

Verbose output is normally sent to standard output, separate from other error messages. However, if the archive is produced directly on standard output, then verbose output is mixed with errors on stderr. Producing the archive on standard output may be used as a way to avoid using disk space, when the archive is soon to be consumed by another process reading it, say. Some people felt the need of producing an archive on stdout, still willing to segregate between verbose output and error output. A possible approach would be using a named pipe to receive the archive, and having the consumer process to read from that named pipe. This has the advantage of letting standard output free to receive verbose output, all separate from errors.