However, Windows 10 users may also come across these files, which is a reason to have a way to extract their contents.Īlthough you can use third-party apps (such as 7-Zip and PeaZip), these apps do not always work as expected with tarballs created on another platform, and they are slow to uncompress many files. Usually, tar files are more common with Ubuntu (other Linux distros) and macOS users for data archival and backups. These files are often referred to as “tarballs.” While you can find them with a double extension (.tar.gz), the extension can also be shortened to. tar.gz format is a file that has been created using the Unix-based archival application tar and then compressed using the gzip compression. Adding that sort of check is left as an exercise for the reader.A file using. ![]() This won't help if a file is specified in the archive with an absolute path (which is normally a sign of malicious intent). One partial solution would be to automatically create a new directory to extract into: for f in *.tar do If both a.tar and b.tar contain the same file and try to extract it at the same time, the results are unpredictable.Ī related issue, especially when taking archives from an untrusted source, is the possibility of a tarbomb. More troubling, you may end up with a corrupted copy of the file if you try this "clever" optimization: for f in *.tar do Since tar overwrites files by default, the exact version of the file you end up with will depend on the order the archives are processed. The most obvious is that a particular file name may be included in more than one tar file. A warningīlindly untarring a bunch of files can cause unexpected problems. If you are a Perl programmer, for instance, take a look at the Archive::Tar module. The format is straightforward and many programming languages have libraries available to read tar files. Finally, the truly dedicated programmer could easily write an tar replacement that works exactly as desired. One approach is to use a shell for loop: $ for f in *.tar do tar xf "$f" doneĪnother method is to use xargs: $ ls *.tar | xargs -i tar xf Īlternatively, you can use one of a number of alternative tar file readers. Passing just one filename to tar xf will extract all the archived files as one would expect. It's too late rewrite tar to accept multiple archive files as input, but it's not too hard to work around the limitation.įor most people, running tar multiple times for multiple archives is the most expedient option. Tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors Meanwhile, GNU tar returns 2 and spams STDERR even with the verbose option off: tar: b.tar: Not found in archive Annoyingly, the Solaris version of tar does not report any problems either in the return code or with the verbose option ( v). Unless a.tar contains a file named b.tar, the tar command has nothing to do and exits quietly. So if there are two *.tar files (say a.tar and b.tar) your command would expand to: $ tar xf a.tar b.tar ![]() ![]() So for tar extraction (the x option), the first file passed would be the archive and all other files would be the files to be extracted. The first file or directory passed was assumed to be the device that held the archive in question and any other files or directories where the contents of the archive to be included in the operation. ![]() Since it only made sense to execute tar on one device at a time, the syntax was designed to assume one and only one device. Originally, the tar command was intended for use with magnetic tape devices.
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