The Great Wakka's Journal: Geocities and Tarballs

By a suggestion, I decided to try Geocities to host my programs. It just won't let me upload my .tar files. Why, pray tell, am I using .tar? Because I can't figure out, for the life of me, how to create .tar.gz files. But creating .tar is very easy: tar --create foo/ > foo.tar is usually enough. Now, don't get me wrong. I did try tar -z --create foo/ > foo.tar.gz, but when I tried to unzip it, I got some nasty errors. It did unzip, then it told me stuff like:
gzip: stdin: decompression OK, trailing garbage ignored
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
How to fix this? A good tutorial on .tgz would be appreciated. Thanks. And any word from GeoCities on why I can't upload .tar files? Any input (other than troll/flame) is appreciated.

UPDATE Jan 21 11:26 EST: I've figured it out. Plus, get the tarballs at Icarus Studios, see our old sites , this one had a modification done to it by accident, and the person charged with keeping the password forgot it, and the very oldest site .

Tarred

[fm6]

The classical way to create a tarball is to create a tar file and then compress it.

tar -cf something.tar *
gzip something.tar

In place of gzip, you can use bzip2, which does a much better job on large files. The Project GNU folks, unable to resist an obvious tweak, added options to call the compression program all at once:

tar -czf something.tar.gz *

You can use -j instead of -z to use bzip2 instead of gzip. And you can break out the options if you feel like it:

tar -c -z -f something.tar.gz *

Finally, you can use the verbose forms, though they really only make sense in shell scripts:

tar --create --gzip --file=something.tar.gz *

Re:Tarred

[The Great Wakka]

Thanks!

This works exactly right...

Re:Tarred

[rendler]

There's nothing I hate more than when people don't pack the files in their own directories. After I download tarballs I usually just untar them in my home directory but with zips I usually create a 'test' dir there first then unpack it in that. I've had too many experiences of unziping things in my home directory and then afterwards spending 5 mins deleting the files that came out of it because they did not get unpacked into their own directory. So my suggestion is to use:
tar -zcf directory.tar.gz directory/ or
tar -jcf directory.tar.bz2 directory/

Re:Tarred

[The Great Wakka]

I agree. These people should at least put a warning on the download page!

Re:Tarred

[fm6]

Oops, you're right. Except that so many people make the mistake that I just made, you have to check most files before you untar them. Or, as the makers of WinZip did, just assume that you need to create a new directory for extracted files.