A-6
Catalyst 2960 and 2960-S Switch Software Configuration Guide
OL-8603-09
Appendix A Working with the Cisco IOS File System, Configuration Files, and Software Images
Working with the Flash File System
Use the /recursive keyword for deleting a directory and all subdirectories and the files contained in it.
Use the /force keyword to suppress the prompting that confirms a deletion of each file in the directory.
You are prompted only once at the beginning of this deletion process. Use the /force and /recursive
keywords for deleting old software images that were installed by usin g the archive download-sw
command but are no longer needed.
If you omit the filesystem: option, the switch uses the default device specified by the cd command. For
file-url, you specify the path (directory) and the name of the file to be deleted.
When you attempt to delete any files, the system prompts you to confirm the de letion.
Caution When files are deleted, their contents cannot be recovered.
This example shows how to delete the file myconfig from the default flash memory device:
Switch# delete myconfig
Creating, Displaying, and Extracting tar Files
You can create a tar file and write files into it, list the files in a tar file, and extract the files from a tar
file as described in the next sections.
Note Instead of using the copy privileged EXEC command or the archive tar privileged EXEC command, we
recommend using the archive download-sw and archive upload-sw privileged EXEC commands to
download and upload software image files.

Creating a tar File

To create a tar file and write files into it, use this privileged EXEC command:
archive tar /create destination-url flash:/file-url
For destination-url, specify the destination URL alias for the local or network file system and the name
of the tar file to create. These options are supported:
• For the local flash file system, the syntax is
flash:
• For the FTP, the syntax is
ftp:[[//username[:password]@location]/directory]/tar-filename.tar
• For the RCP, the syntax is
rcp:[[//username@location]/directory]/tar-filename.tar
• For the TFTP, the syntax is
tftp:[[//location]/directory]/tar-filename.tar
The tar-filename.tar is the tar file to be created.
For flash:/file-url, specify the location on the local flash file system from which the new tar file is
created. You can also specify an optional list of files or directories within the source directory to write
to the new tar file. If none are specified, all files and directories at this level are written to the newly
created tar file.