Hi, > I have a CD that was written by mondorescue and it has hundreds of files in > the form > <number>.afio.bz2.
They must be quite small if hundreds of them fit on a CD. > Can someone suggest a simple command line to extract the hundreds of files > and write/merge them into a single directory tree? The name suffix .bz2 could mean that afio used -Z -P bzip2 when packing up the archives, or that the completed afio archive files were compressed by bzip2. This matters, because afio -Z compresses individual files in the archive, whereas a bzip2 run on the archive stream compresses the whole archive. (This differs from the situation with tar -z) If the archive files were made with afio -Z, then program "file" should say about them <name>: ASCII cpio archive (pre-SVR4 or odc) An afio achive post-compressed by bzip2 should yield <name>: bzip2 compressed data, ... According shell runs for inspection would then be afio -tv NNN.afio.bz2 or bunzip2 < NNN.afio.bz2 | afio -tv - For a combined list of all file paths in the archives i would run for i in *.afio.bz2 do # One of: # afio -tv "$i" # bunzip2 < "$i" | afio -tv - done >/tmp/all_afio_paths 2>&1 Then study file /tmp/all_afio_paths to learn about the path situation. If all paths are relative, i.e. with no leading "/", then create a new directory at a suitable place on the hard disk. Like: archive_dir=/mnt/iso unpack_dir="$HOME"/all_afio_files mkdir "$unpack_dir" cd "$unpack_dir" Then unpack the archive files: for i in "$archive_dir"/*.afio.bz2 do # One of: # afio -ivZ -P bzip2 # bunzip2 < "$i" | afio -iv - done If there are absolute paths in the afio archives, then you might need chroot to force the unpacking to your $unpack_dir. Consider to practive with a single archive file first. Try to find one which contains no old copies of important files. Have a nice day :) Thomas