How to un-tar from a file?

[Jonathan I. Kamens]

In article <27185 at ut-emx.UUCP>, mike at ut-emx.UUCP (Mike O'Donnell) writes:
> I just received some software that was uueencoded.  When I decoded
> it the resulting file was a tar file.  I have tried every combination
> of tar commands to unload this archive.  HELP!  Again, it is 
> a uudecoded file residing in one of my subdirectories.  Thanks in 
> advance for any help.

  Sigh.... it's questions like this which make the people who answer the
questions silently scream "AAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!" to themselves in
frustration.  Not because the question is unreasonable (it is certainly
a reasonable question), but because so little useful information is
provided that it's almost impossible to answer it adequately without
providing much more information than is required -- we've got to throw
*all* of our knowledge about the problem into our answers, since we
haven't been given enough information to know what, in particular, the
you need to know.

  For example, what version of Unix are you using?  When you say that
you "tried every combination of tar commands to unload this archive,"
what EXACTLY do you mean?  What EXACTLY did you type, and how EXACTLY
didn't it work?  Also, are you sure that the archive wasn't compressed
after it was tar'd?

  Given only the information you have provided, the best I can do is
tell you how *I* would go about unpacking a tar archive residing in a
file, on a BSD system.  I would first cd into the directory into which I
want the files to be extracted, and then I would type "tar xvf
filename", where "filename" is the name of the tar archive.

  Moral of the first paragraph above: Please, when you're asking a
question, provide enough useful information so that the people who will
be answering it won't have to ask you for more.  For example, the
operating system you are using, what you *wanted* to happen, what you
*did* to make it happen, and what *actually* happened instead of what
you wanted.

Jonathan Kamens			              USnail:
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jik at Athena.MIT.EDU				Allston, MA  02134
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