tarball

tarball - A simple frontend to tar

SYNOPSIS

tarball [-l, --list] archivefile [filelist]

DESCRIPTION

This documentation describes the use of the shell script tarball, which is a simple frontend to tar aimed at making the most common handling operations of tar archives quicker (and if only by saving one the typing of options to tar).

Supported operations are creation of tar archives, listing of archive contents and unpacking of archives. Supported archive extensions for the last two operations are .tar, .tgz, .tar.gz and .tar.bz2.

If only a single file parameter archivefile is given, tarball extracts the contents of the archive. Otherwise an archive archivefile.tar.bz2 is created (a tar archive compressed by bzip2, which is more efficient than gzip) and files/directories in filelist are added to it. The use of wildcards is possible in filelist, though you might find it necessary to protect them from shell expansion by enclosing them in ``''.

OPTIONS

-l, --list archivefile
Lists the contents of archive archivefile.

-h, --help
Shows a short usage summary, same as calling tarball with no parameters at all.

-v, --version
Display version info.

EXAMPLES

Learning by example is almost always easiest, so here are quite a few:

tarball foo.tar.gz
Extracts the contents of archive foo.tar.gz.

tarball --list foo.tgz
Lists the contents of foo.tgz.

tarball foo bar
Archives bar into newly created archive foo.tar.bz2. If bar is a directory, then the whole contents are added to the archive.

tarball foo foo/
Archives directory foo into foo.tar.bz2. Note that this is similar to above example, with the difference that bar could be a file or a directory while foo/ is definitely a directory.

tarball foo suse*
Archives all files and directories matching pattern suse* into foo.tar.bz2. Note that you might find it necessary to protect the filelist parameter from expansion by the shell: tarball foo "suse*".

tarball foo suse* redhat
Archives all files/directories whose names start with suse as well as file/directory redhat into foo.tar.bz2. Again, you might need to protect the filelist from shell expansion: tarball foo "suse* redhat" (or tarball foo "suse*" redhat, even)

REQUIRES

Obviously, the script requires tar. If compressed archives are to be handled, the appropriate compressors (gzip and bzip2, respectively) need to be installed, too.

BUGS

There are currently no known bugs, though that doesn't mean there aren't any. The script has been extensively used, however, so the chances of there being any bugs are probably minimal (but don't count on it).

Please send any bug reports, comments, feature requests, praise etc. by email to michael@peceny.de.

SEE ALSO

tar(1), gzip(1), bzip2(1)

AUTHOR

Copyright (c) 2001-2001 Michael Peceny, michael@peceny.de.

URL http://www.peceny.de/helpers/

This script is free software. Permission is granted to any individual or institution to use, copy, or redistribute this software so long as all of the originalfiles are included, that it is not sold for profit, and that this copyright notice is retained.

TARBALL IS PROVIDED AS IS AND COMES WITH NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED. IN NO EVENT WILL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES RESULTING FROM THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.