[olug] tar ?? i think

[Christopher Cashell]

At Thu, 03 Jul 03, Unidentified Flying Banana Nathan Brown, said:
> I have a file for flash player installation the file is  
> "install_flash_player_6_linux.tar.gz".  I don't know how to install it.  I'm 
> sorry I use to know this but I have forgotten even how to look it up.

What you're dealing with is a 'tar.gz' file, which is a gzip compressed
tar file.

Basically, what tar does is simply combine a group of files into a
single file.  gzip then compresses the new single file.

In order to access install_flash_player_6_linux.tar.gz, you would run:

 gzip -d install_flash_player_6_linux.tar.gz

Which would give you a resulting file without the ".gz" extension.  You
then want to untar this file.  You do that with: 

 tar -xvf install_flash_player_6_linux.tar

The -x means you want to extract, the -v means to be verbose, and
the -f means that the next thing will be a file name to operate on.

And now that I've gone through the details, I'll mention that because
this is such a common procedure, tar actually has support built in for
compressing and decompressing tar files.  So, instead of the above two
steps, you can just do:

 tar -zxvf install_flash_player_6_linux.tar.gz

If you notice the -z option that was added, that directs tar to treat
this as a compressed archive.

Hope this helps.

> thanks,
> Nate

-- 
| Christopher
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| A: No.                                         |
| Q: Should I include quotations after my reply? |
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