How to have an archive with full paths, BUT without creating a tarbomb?

Question

I want to create an archive file that preserves the absolute path information of the originals, but I have not been able to find a way to do this that does not result in a tarbomb?

For concreteness, suppose that I want to make a (compressed) archive file (*.zip or *.tgz or anything else) that includes the files

/usr/share/foo/bsd/config.yaml
/usr/share/foo/linux/config.yaml
/usr/share/foo/windows/config.yaml

...and I want to preserve the information encoded in the full path of the original files.

Ideally, when the archive is extracted, it should produce the following files

./<BASENAME>/usr/share/foo/bsd/config.yaml
./<BASENAME>/usr/share/foo/linux/config.yaml
./<BASENAME>/usr/share/foo/windows/config.yaml

...where <BASENAME> stands for the archive file's basename (EXcluding its extension).

One way I could do this would be to create ./<BASENAME>/usr/share/foo/{bsd,linux,windows} directories, create symlinks in these directories to the corresponding files, create an archive of the ./<BASENAME> directory (including whatever flag may be needed to ensure that the symlinks get dereferenced at the time of adding items to the archive), and run rm -rf ./<BASENAME> once the archive file is ready.

Is there a less labored approach?

Answer 1

My approach would be similar to the following:

tar -Pczvf ./test.tgz /usr/share/foo/{bsd,linux,windows}

Using GNU TAR:
-P: absolute names
-c: create
-z: gzip compression
-v: verbose output
-f: file name for archive

This would give you a compressed archive with the absolute paths for the included files. Then you could extract the archive onto any base you would like using -C, or just extract the files to the absolute locations by using -P again:

tar -xzvf ./test.tgz -C $BASENAME
tar -Pxzvf ./test.tgz

Answer 2

You can try by using relative paths, something like:

cd /
tar cvf path/to/tar_file.tar usr/share/foo/{bsd,linux,windows}/config.yaml

so you have the path w/o leading slash.