tar archives.

[Geoff Shang]

On Tue, 6 Mar 2001, Charles Hallenbeck wrote:

> Hi Shawn -
> The parameters do not need the leading '-', and ordinarily you would use
> four letters The first one is either 'x' or 'c' for "extract" or "create",
> the next letter is either 'z' or 'y' for "gz" or "bz2", the third one is
> 'v' for "verbose", and the fourth one is 'f' meaning that the filename
> follows. So what you want is:
>
> tar xzvf filename.tar.gz

A couple of comments.  The -v option can get quite annoying, especially if
you're unpacking something big.  If you omit it, it will unpack it
silently, which is what I do.  Also, I'd rather know what it's unpacking
before I do it, not as I do it,  hense I use:

tar -ztf filename.tar.gz |more

This is useful as tar files usually create a subdirectory, and you want to
be sure that it's not going to be a directory that already exists as the
contents of the tar file will mingle with any files already there.  I did
this to a linux kernel source tree once and it made a nice mess.

For the bz2 flag, this varies from version to version of tar.  My version
has I (that's capital I).  Apparently, some other implelementations use
this for something else, so recent versions of tar use j.  Check your tar
manpage or the built-in command help (tar --help) if you wish to unpack bz2
files.

Geoff.