I tar, You tar , He ...

Da SunManagers (febbraio 2008) Thread Tar question Solaris 9
1.  Never archive/backup (tar, cpio) anything by absolute path!
  Always 'cd' and use the relative path.  Example: you want to
  backup /var you should do;
   cd /
tar cvf /opt/NOME.tar ./var/* # Notice it is DOT-/var
  This will give you an /opt/NOME.tar which you can extract from
  anywhere.  If you wanted to restore to your REAL /var, you use the
  same method as above:
   cd /
tar xvf /opt/NOME.tar
  Which will extract to 'var' which is relative to / (here).
  Of course, you can also:
   cd /tmp
tar xvf /opt/NOME.tar
  and extract to /tmp/var/...

2.  I always prefer to use GNU tar (gtar) to create/extract tarballs.
  (On my Solaris9 systems it is: /usr/sfw/bin/gtar)
  By default, GNU tar will convert absolute paths to relative paths
  (changes leading '/' to './').  gtar is probably not available in
  boot -s environment where you have system mounted under /a;
  however, IIRC tarballs created with gtar will extract with plain
  old tar.  You might experiment to verify that it works for you.

Hope this helps.
Hi,
Try this;

cd /var
tar clf - * | (cd /a; tar xpf -)