pkgtool not working?
 

Hi,

I thought I read this before here, but a "pkgtool" search reveals nothing.

After I key in pkgtool, I chose Other to install packages from some other directory. After entering the directory, pkgtool exits.

What happened or what is the correct response I should be getting? Have I done anything wrong?

Man pkgtool no helpful either.

Thanks.

Esael

If pkgtool does not locate the directory or any packages available in the directory specified then it terminates after entering the directory name. It is probably better and easier to change to the directory desired and run pkgtool from that location. You also have the opportunity to view what packages are actually available before installing.

I've some .tar.gz files in /tmp directory. What I did was to cd into /tmp dir and run pkgtool then choose Current to install.

But pkgtool still exits.

Any ideas?

Silly question, but are you certain these ".tar.gz" files are Slackware
packages? I believe pkgtool will exit if it doesn't find any usable packages
in whatever directory you point it.

Slack packages use the the ".tgz" extension. "tar.gz" are just gzipped tar files. Use the "tar" command to extract them.

tar -xzvf the_file_name.tar.gz

These are usually source distributions and will require building prior to installation. But read the README and INSTALL files first to determine what is required. For instance, I know Opera is not source distributed, but binary only. After it is extracted you would just run ./install.sh to install it. For source distributions, then usually it starts with something like the following:

./configure
make
make install

Cheers!

<slightly off topic>
Ahem. There is no requirement that any files use any extension.

While it's true that pkgtool looks for files that are named with a .tgz
extension, that's a mistake that should be easy to fix (I'm working on a
patch right now).

It's starting to sound like I'm a nutcase when it comes to filenames, but
UNIX does not limit your file names, thus you cannot rely on the file
name to tell you what is contained within, but you CAN rely on the
magic number within the file to tell you what it contains.

man file

If these files are in fact tarballs, you can do:
file -z filename.tar.gz
and it will return something like:
GNU tar archive (gzip compressed data). . .
</slightly off topic>

Regardless of whether the tarballs are slackpacks, you can do as
Excalibur says, which is decompress and unarchive them by using
tar xzvf filename.tar.gz. If this is a slackpack, there will be a directory
called "install" when you unwrap it. Until my patch is done, you can just
rename the .tar.gz to .tgz and pkgtool will be able to handle it.
Otherwise, it's jut a bunch of files that someone thought were important
enough to put together in a tarball.

oooh.... now I see it. Thanks.