un-TARring a bunch of files at once

grapnell · 02-12-2006, 08:02 AM

Hi all,
I hope this is a simple question, but I have searched high and low and haven't found an answer. Is there a way to un-tar a bunch of tar.gz files at one time in a directory? I have about 500 tar.gz files that I want to untar, but it will only let me do it one file at a time (from the command line) e.g. if I tar -xzvf *.tar.gz, it just tells me that blah blah blah is not found in the archive. Any suggestions? the man page was no help.
Thanks in advance,
Jeff

fudam · 02-12-2006, 08:21 AM

Hi Jeff,

The problem with your command is that "*.tar.gz" gets expanded in the shell before it's fed to the tar command. So it sees the first .tar.gz file as the actual file and the rest as parameters to search for within the aforementioned first .tar.gz.

Try this out instead: for i in *.tar.gz; do tar -xvzf "$i"; done;

-fudam

XavierP · 02-12-2006, 09:18 AM

Please do not post the same thread in more than one forum. Picking the most relevant forum and posting it once there makes it easier for other members to help you and keeps the discussion all in one place.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/rules.php