i have a directory full of tar.gz files. i want to unpack all of them into a directory.

tar zxvf filename.gz for a single file but what about multiple files.

i want to do all of them at once is there a way to do this I'm not sure how i tried tar.zxvf *.gz but that didn't work.

thanks,
AD

try this:

for a in `ls -1 *.gz`; do tar xzvf $a; done

I'm assuming that by didn't work, you mean it put them in seperate folders. I don't know how to make it all untar into the same folder, but here's a script that will take the files from the seperate folder and put them all into one. Copy and paste the script below into a new text file (Leave out the lines that mark the beginning and the end) in the directory containing the directories your files were untarred into, call it something like move.sh. Then run "chmod u+x <name of script>" and then run "./<name of script>"

---Begin script---
#!/bin/sh
#This script takes files in all subdirectories of the current directory except DEST_DIR and copies them into DEST_DIR
DEST_DIR=all_files #Edit this to point to the folder you want

if [ -d $DEST_DIR ]
then
for file in *
do
if [ -d $file ]
then
if [ $file != $DEST_DIR ]
then
cp -R $file/* $DEST_DIR
fi
fi
done
else
echo "Error: $DEST_DIR does not exist or is not a directory."
echo "To set the destination directory, edit this $0 and set DEST_DIR."
fi
---End script---

mhearn,

thanks man worked like a charm. how the hell did you figure out the command. i tried tar --help and looked through all of the different options with no luck.

i havent tried the script yet oot thanks


ahhhh,
thanks man

I am a bash programmer in my spare time, I use it in the autopackage project.

ls -1 gives a list of each file on a newline, the wildcards (filename globbing) should be obvious, it's the same as in dos.

for varname in[list];

list is a string split using the contents of the IFS special variable, in this case set to a space, so this script will fail if any of the files have a space in the same. The backtick ` operator executes the command inside it and substitutes the output (in this case, the newlines are turned into spaces). Therefore varname is set to each file in turn.

tar xzvf $varname;

extracts the file and "done" indicates the end of the loop.

Basic shell programming. You've gotta love bash.

way coooooool thanks man.

AD