ddj@zardoz.club.cc.cmu.edu (Doug DeJulio) (02/13/91)
Archive-name: gnu/utils/gnu-tar/1991-02-12 Archive: prep.ai.mit.edu:/pub/gnu/tar-1.09.tar.Z [18.71.0.38] Original-posting-by: ddj@zardoz.club.cc.cmu.edu (Doug DeJulio) Original-subject: Re: File compressor Reposted-by: emv@ox.com (Edward Vielmetti) In article <11FEB91204839@uazhe0.physics.arizona.edu> zazula@uazhe0.physics.arizona.edu writes: > It is so very nice to do archiving rather than compressing. That is, > create a file that you can get the contents of without uncompressing > it. Compress does do a great job but I don't like the idea of TAR -> > COMPRESS. You have to uncompress to look at the tar file contents. > With something like ZIP, ARC, ZOO ... you can list the files without > uncompressing them *AND* extract only the file(s) you want... Use gnu tar. It has an additional option, 'z', which means to use compress. So, to create a compressed tar file, all you need to do is "gtar zcf tarfile.tar.Z contents". To extract it, do "gtar zxf tarfile.tar.Z", and to list it do "gtar ztf tarfile.tar.Z". It also has nifty features like multivolume tar archives, and it will work with network tape drives if they work with rdump. (eg. "tar cf foo.cmu.edu:/dev/nrst8 contents") It's available via anonymous FTP from prep.ai.mit.edu. -- Doug DeJulio ddj@zardoz.club.cc.cmu.edu