Keep Old Files

GNU tar provides two options to control its actions in a situation when it is about to extract a file which already exists on disk.

‘--keep-old-files’

‘-k’

Do not replace existing files from archive. When such a file is encountered, tar issues an error message. Upon end of extraction, tar exits with code 2 (see exit status).

‘--skip-old-files’

Do not replace existing files from archive, but do not treat that as error. Such files are silently skipped and do not affect tar exit status.

Additional verbosity can be obtained using ‘--warning=existing-file’ together with that option (see section Controlling Warning Messages).

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