::I was stupid enough to install Suse 8, that seems to be either a ::tateless joke or Mandrake very cunning marketing plot, and I have ::experienced nothing but pain since then. oh pulease... I have 9 co-workers using 8.0 on a daily basis as their workstations since we've stopped buying Sun workstations and went to PC's running SuSE. These 9 are just the new boxes that have been deployed. I have heard not one compliant and these are cranky old school Unix guys. I'll say it again as others have ..8.0 has had some changes...but I can also add that SuSE doesn't write gtar which is the tar that most Linux systems use..so blaming them for a tar malfunction is just goofy. ::tar xfIv foo.tar.bz2 Try this: tar -jxvf foo.tar.bz2 The -j tells tar that it's a bzip2 file. I found this out by doing a 'man tar'...imagine that. ::tar xfzv bar.tar.gz Try this: tar -zxvf bar.tar.gz The -z option tells tar that it's a gzip file..that hasn't changed. I just checked this out on my officemates 8.0 box. ::Why Suse8 was shipped? This is certainly a very early alphaand bad one. Alpha ..I think not..unless we are talking about AXP ;) -=Ben --=====-----=====-- mailto:ben@whack.org --=====-- If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little. -GC --=====-----=====--