dseah@wpi.wpi.edu (David I Seah) (05/04/89)
I am relatively new to the world of UNIX compression/archive programs. The files availiable via anonymous ftp at 128.163.128.6 are compressed somehow. I tried downloading kermit.tar.Z. I ran it through zcat, and it took relatively long to finish (6 seconds). I ended up with a .tar file that was 3 megabytes long! Fortunately, quota seems to be off, but I'm sure that our system dude wouldn't be pleased. So...how is one supposed to extract the programs from these files without incurring the wrath of the Disk Quota gnomes? Dave Seah (dseah@wpi.wpi.edu, dseah@wpi.bitnet); (I suppose I could ask someone here at WPI, but I thought this would be of general interest)
gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) (05/04/89)
In article <2199@wpi.wpi.edu> dseah@wpi.wpi.edu (David I Seah) writes: >files availiable via anonymous ftp at 128.163.128.6 are compressed somehow. *.Z files are usually "compress"ed and need to be unpacked by "uncompress" or, as you did, by "zcat" (both are just links to "compress"). The compression scheme is basically LZW. In order to avoid unpacking the whole thing, you can use a pipeline: zcat kermit.tar.Z | tar tvf - # to view the table of contents zcat kermit.tar.Z | tar xf - names... # to extract selected files