Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4237 mails)

[Randall R Schulz <rschulz@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 25 August 2004 20:38, chuck holland wrote:
> Could someone give me a detailed instructions on to install Tar.gz
> files.
>
> Thanks

Not really. TAR is an archiving format--a way to collect multiple files 
into a single file. Gzip is a compression scheme--a way to remove 
redundant information for a file in a way that is reversible.

A file with the suffixes ".tar.gz" could hold anything. Often it is the 
source files required to build a piece of software. Typically, that would 
be built by extracting the content, changing to the top directory into 
which you extracted the files, running the supplied "configure" script 
and then running "make", followed possibly by "make install". For this to 
work you'll need compilers and linkers and an unpredictable set of 
libraries.

However, if you're not at least minimally familiar with building software 
for Linux systems, this is likely to prove a frustrating exercise.


But your ".tar.gz" file could contain a ready-to-run, compiled program (or 
a program that does not comprise a native binary executable, but rather a 
program that runs under an interpreter, such as Perl or Python). In that 
case, often all that's required is extracting the contents of the 
compressed archive and invoking the supplied program.


In many cases, there will be a read-me file (usually called README or 
ReadMe or something subtle like that). That's always a good place to 
start for instructions on how to use the contents of the archive.


The only thing that's for sure about a ".tar.gz" is that you process it 
with the "tar" command if you inclue the "z" option (that instructs it to 
handle the gzip compression).


List the contents:

% tar ztf something.tar.gz


List the contents including file attributes (like "ls -l"):

% tar ztvf something.tar.gz


Extract the contents of the file:

% tar zxf something.tar.gz



Have fun!

Randall Schulz