Extract Multiple tar files

Mateusz,

I have no idea, but this must mean that you figured out the command to download the Darwin files.

What was the syntax for the command???

Andy

cd to the directory that has all your tar files.

tar -xvf *.tar

Mateusz,
Jeff's command should work if:
- all of the tar files have the .tar extension (and really are tar files)
- you have permission to read the tar files and write to the directory.

Can you post the error?

Reese

To add to what Reese already said: posting "it doesn't work. I get an error." is not likely to help solve the problem.

Posting something like:
I cd'ed to the directory that has the tar files in it and executed this command:

tar -xvf *.tar

I received this error:
blah blah blah

is much more likely to help us help you solve the problem.

tar accepts only one archive. You need a loop to expand multiple archives.
<pre>
for f in *.tar
do
tar -xvf "$f"
done
</pre>

Oops. Thanks Jun. I'm so used to passing multiple files to tools on the command-line, I didn't even stop to think that one wouldn't work with multiples.

You can also do this:

find . -name '*.tar' -exec tar -xvf {} \;

Hi Jeff,

I believe

tar -xvf *.tar

does not work because the shell replaces *.tar by a list of files matching that pattern. The tar 'f' option, however, expects only one filename as parameter.
For instance, if you have f1.tar and f2.tar in that directory, the above command will be translated by the shell to:

tar -xvf f1.tar f2.tar

Which doesn't work, if I am not mistaken...

Just my 2 cents :-D

Antonello

I'm so used to passing multiple files to tools on the command-line, I didn't even stop to think that one wouldn't work with multiples.

Same here. I could have sworn I have extracted multiple tar files this way... I was wrong.

A caution on Jeff's find command- If the directory with the tar files has no sub dirs then this is great, but if for example the tar files are at root (/) then this command will search the whole system (including mounts) looking for, then extracting tar files.

Reese

A caution on Jeff's find command- If the directory with the tar files has no sub dirs then this is great, but if for example the tar files are at root (/) then this command will search the whole system (including mounts) looking for, then extracting tar files.

Good point. You can add a -maxdepth flag to the find command.

find . -name '*.tar' -maxdepth 1 -exec tar -xvf {} \;

This will extract all tar files that are located in the current directory.

Another option is to replace "." with "*.tar" and leave out the -name option. I.e.

find *.tar -exec tar xvf '{}' ';'

Should run faster if you have a lot of dirs in "."