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.
