*BSD News Article 70145


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From: sn@penelope.frmug.fr.net (Sylvain Nierveze)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: A tale of terrible .tar troubles...
Date: 1 Jun 1996 14:31:05 +0200
Organization: Penelope Corp.
Lines: 21
Message-ID: <4opd69$3oh@penelope.frmug.fr.net>
References: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960526103708.414A-100000@jesus.serv.net>
Reply-To: sn@penelope.frmug.fr.net
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jimbo (root@jesus.serv.net) wrote:
: Ok, I'm new at all this...just got my X-Windows and PPP running, and was 
: looking forward to installing some software that's not in package format 
: (i.e. Netscape), and it gunzips just fine, but whenever I try to do a tar 
: -x command, it throws this at me:

: tar:  can't open /dev/rst0:  Device not configured.

manpage for tar(1) command says that you can use the -f option to specify
the file or device to use instead of the default (/dev/rst0). Therefore,
try :
- to extract an archive:
tar xf myarchive.tar
- to create an archive named foo.tar:
tar cf foo.tar
The GNU version (shipped with FreeBSD) of tar has some enhancements 
like the -z to gzip/gunzip a .tar.gz file and (un)tarring it on the fly, 
and -C to specify another destination directory instead of the current dir:
tar zxf netscape.tar.gz -C ~/netscape decompresses the archive and untars
it in the subdirectory of your login dir. (if the netscape dir exists,
of course).