How do you unarchive with TAR?

[Ralf Holighaus]

TJS111 at psuvm.psu.edu (Thomas J. Snively) writes:

>Recently, I've been getting in to getting cool things for free off the
>netnews by downloading things and such.  I've had mild success, but I'm
>stuck on this tar thing.

>Ok, suppose I have a file, foo.foo.tar, ok?  The directions that the
>poster says is "Tar this into your favorite directory...."
>I can't unarchive anything.  I've read the manual on it several times,
>and can't understand it.
>If I'm in my home directory, and want to unarchive that whole thing into,
>say, /stuff, what do I do?

1. Change in the desired directory.

2. There may be two possibilities:
	2a) The file foo.foo.tar is a tar archive file, that means it
	    contains files

	2b) The file foo.foo.tar is on an archive disk

   As you downloaded the file, i suppose case 2a) will be the right thing.

3. For extracting the files of the 2a) archive file, simply use
	tar xvf - < foo.foo.tar
   It tells tar to extract files, but read from the standard input.

Rgds

Ralf.

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