Preserving Context with tar

[Stephen Smalley]

On Wed, 2005-10-19 at 22:32 -0400, Daniel J Walsh wrote:
> W. Scott wilburn wrote:
> > Sorry to be asking such a simple question. Is it possible to preserve 
> > file contexts using tar? I would have thought -p would do this, but 
> > it appears no, atleast on RHEL4 and FC4.
> >
> > The reason to do this is a use tar to install modified config files on 
> > new machines. Having to relabel after doing this is somewhat slow. 
> > Perhaps there is a better solution?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >   
> Have you looked at star?

Usage is:
	# create an archive including xattrs
	star -xattr -H=exustar -c -f foo.tar <list of files to archive>
	# extract the archive, preserving any xattrs in it
	star -x -f foo.tar

rsync also has support for xattr preservation (-X, --xattrs), at least
in FC4.

An option for GNU tar might be to selectively apply restorecon to the
files you are extracting if they are being extracted to the same path on
the destination machine as on the source machine and both machines have
the same policy, e.g.:
	tar xvf foo.tar | xargs /sbin/restorecon

-- 
Stephen Smalley
National Security Agency