<quote who="Matt D"> > I am a new Debian user that has almost no unix background. I was > wondering how to untar a file so that I can burn it on a CD? > Thanx, Matt!
if it ends in .tar: tar -xvf filename.tar (you don't need the v, it is for verbose, i like verbose though) if it ends in .tar.gz: tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz if it ends in .tar.bz2: tar -Ixvf filename.tar.bz2 or tar -jxvf filename.tar.bz2 (many non debian systems don't have bzip2 integrated into their tar yet.. debian 2.2 uses -Ixvf and debian 3.0 uses -jxvf) if it ends in .tar.Z: tar -Zxvf filename.tar.Z see the man page for tar for more info. some systems also do not require the use of the - when specifying options to tar. i do it out of habbit. also if your going to be burning the contents of a tar file onto CD, i reccomend making sure the CD is in rockridge format. that way permissions and owernship is preserved. if your burning in plain ISO9660 or joliet(MS), then you should probably keep it in a tar file to keep that extra data. in most cases it makes life a lot easier to deal with the files. nate
