tar archives.

[Frank Carmickle]

Hi Chuck
How do you get less to view what's in a tarball?  If you use zless maybe
you could see that with out using other means but less doesn't know how to
gunzip.

     Frank Carmickle
phone:     412 761-9568
email:     frankiec at dryrose.com

On Wed, 7 Mar 2001, Charles Hallenbeck wrote:

> 
> Good points, Geoff -
> 
> Another way to preview a.tar.gz or a .tgz file is to use the viewer 'less'
> - it is smart enough to show you what is in the archive.
> 
> Chuck
> 
> On Wed, 7 Mar 2001, Geoff Shang wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
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> 
> My web site is http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh 
> The Moon is Waxing Gibbous (93% of Full)
> 
> 
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