tar command?

First a suggestion for the Board administrator(s) -- Perhaps we also need a UNIX Neophyte forum where previous neophyte questions can be posted and/or new newbie questions as well?

if the file is a tar.gz file and you have gzip installed on your system:

gzcat /my/src/mytarball.tar.gz|tar xvf - (make sure you're in the directory where you want to explode this tarball).

Also you can verify whether the tarball has been created with relative file paths or absolute file paths (gzcat /my/src/mytarball.tar.gz|tar tvf -).

You can substitute similar syntax depending on whether the file has been compressed, gziped, bzip2'ed etc.

Compress -- .Z (uncompress to uncompress and zcat to "cat" the Compressed file)

gzip -- .gz (gunzip to ungzip and gzcat to "cat" the gziped file)

bzip2 -- .bz2 (bunzip2 and bzcat)

Or you could download and install a copy of the GNU tar utility -- which will give you the ability to run :

tar zxvf to extract gzip files

tar jxvf to extract bzip files...

and so on...

Nuff sed -- someone had already pointed you to the man pages.

1) man man to learn how to RTF<ine>M

2) man tar to learn how to use tar

implicate_order at 2007-7-6 14:05:02 >