RE: How do i access a file with *.tar on the end?

[Ian Stewart VerizonWireless com]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alexander Skwar [mailto:ASkwar DigitalProjects com]
> Sent: Thursday, August 30, 2001 2:14 AM
> To: gnome-pilot-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: How do i access a file with *.tar on the end?
> 
> 
> So sprach »Patrick Lane« am 2001-08-29 um 15:53:08 -0700 :
> > this will extract the file. Tarballs are compressed data 
> (similar to a 
> 
> No, they are not.  Tarballs contain multiple files, but the files are
> "simply" appended to each other.  Compression is normally done by
> gnuzip, in which case the file is named foo.tar.gz or foo.tgz.
> Increasingly often, you'll find .tar.bz2 files.  These are compressed
> with bzip2 - yet another compression program which works A LOT better
> than gzip.

If you are running GNU tar you can extract a gzipped tarball in one swell
foop with the command 'tar xzvf tarball.tar.gz'.  For bzipped tarballs you
can either use the -I switch (depends on which version of tar you're using,
also may be a build-time option) or use the piped command 'bzcat
tarball.tar.bz2 | tar -xv'.

The second command will also work with non-GNU tar.


HTH,
Ian