[Wolves] Opening tar files from LXF DVD

[Steve Parkes]

On 7 Jun 2004, at 22:42, Mo Awkati wrote:

> Hi
>
> I have tried to open the Mozilla Firefox file from
> this month's LXF DVD.
>
> first of all I am not sure which tar file to unpack:
> there are two as follows, what is the difference and
> which one should I use?
> firefox-0.8-i686-linux-gtk2+xft.tar.gz
> firefox-0.8.i686-pc-linux-gnu,tar.gz

the first one links against gtk2 (the gnome2 gui libs) and xft which If 
I remember correctly is a gnome xml lib.  If you have these libs this 
one might be the prettiest option ;-) I will make the presumtion that 
the other uses more std libs or is self contained.  But as I haven't 
built mozilla from source in a long, long time I can't be sure.
>
> I tried to open the latter from the command line, I
> typed tar
> xzvf/home/mo/Downloads/firefox-0.8.i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz

pretty sure that it is the missing space between f and / in your email 
that is to blame.  The / and the bits following it are the file the f 
refers to.
>
> I got a message to the effect that the 'f' is old and
> it needs an argument and that I should look at tar
> --man. I did but I couldn't make sense of it. So I
> tried without the 'f' and the konsole just froze.

if you are extracting something (x) it assumes if you don't specify a 
file (f) that the contents of std in need to be unzipped (z) and 
untarred (x).  This is a cool feature of unix like systems that allows 
you to pipe the output from one command to another.  Unfortunatly that 
is not what you want at the moment ;-) and only confuses the issue.
>
> Help!!
>
>
> Mo
>
>
sparkes