*BSD News Article 25666


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From: michaelv@iastate.edu (Michael L. VanLoon)
Subject: Re: Silliest question of the month: "tar" command
Message-ID: <michaelv.757875709@ponderous.cc.iastate.edu>
Sender: news@news.iastate.edu (USENET News System)
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames IA
References: <59017@sdcc12.ucsd.edu>
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 1994 17:01:49 GMT
Lines: 30

In <59017@sdcc12.ucsd.edu> dcalabre@sdcc15.ucsd.edu (David Calabrese) writes:


>	It seems that a lot of people use "tar" like a generic file
>compressor (or perhaps used to.)  I've dug up a "tarred" (and
>possibly feathered as well, it's difficult to tell) file, and of
>course there's not a Unix manual in sight and of course tar refuses
>to read from anything except UCSD's tape drives.  (The file is
>safely in my account on disk already.)
>	And OF COURSE the help on our system also assumes that you
>want nothing other than to read hundreds of meters of tape and if
>someone was unfashionable enough to tar a file on disk that's its 
>your problem...

So, what's your question?  Are you asking how to use the tar command?

If you want to see what's in the file, try this:
	tar -tf filename | more

If you want to actually extract it, go to the desired directory, then:
	tar -xvf path/filename

To get the manual page on tar:
	man tar

-- 
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  Michael L. VanLoon                           Project Vincent Systems Staff
  michaelv@iastate.edu              Iowa State University Computation Center
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