On
this
post to the Mageia development mailing list by Thierry Vignaud,
I discovered that GNU tar (at least in
recent versions) has an “-a” flag which is useful in conjunction with its
“-c” (create new archive) mode. This is because it detects the suitable
compression based on the extension and uses the appropriate flag.
So: “tar -cavf myarchive.tar.gz ./mydir/” is equivalent to
“tar -czvf myarchive.tar.gz ./mydir/”,
“tar -cavf myarchive.tar.bz2 ./mydir/” does the same thing
as “tar -cjvf myarchive.tar.bz2 ./mydir/” and so forth. When
unpacking archives, you can omit the “-a/-z/-j/-J” flags, because GNU tar
will detect the compression of the archive based on the file magic of the
compressed formats.
Another useful (and open-source) tool for manipulating tarballs and
other archives is
patool, but I've been
meaning to suggest they do a short-circuiting when converting tarballs from
.tar.gz to .tar.xz to .tar.bz2 / etc.
Anyway, enjoy.
Meta
I know I’ve been really negligent with blogging in
my blogs lately (which
is not good), but don’t worry - I am fine, just busy with a lot of stuff
including work work (which gives money but consumes time), doing quite a lot
of coding and other development on open-source software, some Freecell-related
research, keeping up with my E-mails, posting to mailing lists, playing some
computer games, chatting a lot (maybe too much) on the IRC, and naturally -
sleeping.
It seems that despite starting the new job in December, and despite the fact
that it was now spring time (which is often a time of calamity for me), I
did not have any particularly
strong
periods of stress lately, which is a good think. Thanks, $DEITY!
Today a friend who is an Israeli open-source enthusiast called me and asked me
why
I disappeared and if everything OK, and I replied, but he later called again
and said his mobile phone mixed me with someone else. Anyway, you can always
reach me in many
ways, but I think I should start blogging more often, so I‘ve picked up
this tech tip as the lowest hanging fruit.
|
