Tech Tip: GNU tar’s “-a” Flag
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.