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. > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup > My web site is http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh The Moon is Waxing Gibbous (93% of Full)
