Re: [vox-tech] Really easy question

[Micah Cowan <micah@cowanMAPSbox.com>]

On Mon, Feb 12, 2001 at 03:44:33PM -0800, jdnewmil@dcn.davis.ca.us wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Feb 2001, William Kendrick wrote:
> 
> > > How do I untar to a specified directory?
> > > 
> > > That is I have /mnt/cd/something.tar.gz (i.e. on my CD)
> > > and I want to untar it to /usr/local/src/...
> > > 
> > > Instead of copying the file to /usr/local/src and untarring it there.
> > 
> > Simple!  Just cd into the directory you want to untar into
> > (ie, "cd /usr/local/src"), and then specify the tar file's relative
> > or absolute path when you run tar (ie, "tar -xzf /mnt/cd/some.tar.gz")
> 
> I find it is usually prudent to do
> 
> $ cd /usr/local/src
> $ tar tzvf /mnt/cd/some.tar.gz | less
>   # note "-" is not normally used with tar
> 
> and inspect the output to insure that it puts all the files into their own 
> directory rather than spewing multiple files and subdirectories into
> /usr/local/src like some poorly-constructed tarballs do.  If it doesn't, I
> can create the directory myself, cd there, and proceed as bill suggested.

Since only brain-damaged people write those sorts of tarballs, I
usually rely on it to do "the Right Thing(tm)".  In those annoying
(but thankfully rare) circumstances when they don't, I do:

for n in `tar tzf /mnt/cd/some.tar.gz`; do rm -rf $n; done

-Micah