Re: files with tar.gz

[Thornton Prime <thornton yoyoweb com>]

On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, John Marlovits wrote:

> Is there a easier way to uncompress these stupid files?
> gunzip -d  filename.tar.gz
> tar who knows how this stupid thing works..
> tar -x filename.tar    this just locks up and have to Ctrl c out
>
> Running redhat ver.6
>
> Can't I run one thing to totaly uncomress these?  Why are they double compressed?

GNU tar includes compression handling flags:

   tar xvfz gzipped.tar.gz
   tar xvfZ compressed.tar.Z
   tar xvfI bzip2ed.tar.bz2

The reason why your 'tar -x filename.tar' is failing is because you have
not specified a source file (the -f flag) so it is looking for tar data on
stdin and hoping to extract the file 'filename.tar' from the stdin stream.
You probably want:

   tar xf filename.tar

but, like I listed above you can do both the gzip and untar in one swipe,
which is the equivalent of:

  gzip -c -d filename.tar.gz | tar x


All this and more is available in your friendly man page.

thornton