I am trying to install flashplayer to use with Fedora5. I have the file install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz on my desktop but am unable to work out how to unpackage it. Help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers Richard

Creates a folder on your desktop with the contents of the archive.

Arow Thank you for your advice. I put in the command and received the following.

[root@localhost ~]# tar xzf ~/Desktop/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz
tar: /root/Desktop/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
[root@localhost ~]#
Obviously I am doing something wrong
Regards Richard

Did you download this as a normal user? Because then it's in user's HOME and the '~' is expanding to root's HOME. You don't need to be root to untar it - or even compile it, in most cases - just to install it. Though I know nothing of flash, admittedly.

(Also, 'tar xf' should suffice - recent GNU tar's are smart enough to tell gzipped from bzip2ed files.)

The man page for tar is great. I always mix up a couple options for the tar command and doing a quick 'man tar', I can find out the correct usage pretty quickly.

Digiot. The file was downloaded as a normal user.
This is what happened when putting in your command
[rbawden@localhost ~]$ tar xf /Desktop/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz
tar: /Desktop/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
[rbawden@localhost ~]$
Thanks again for your help
Richard

That time you had a leading / which makes it absolute - for an absolute path it's probably '/home/rbawden/Desktop/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz' (or, as mentioned, '~/Desktop/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz' as long as the tilde expands correctly) and for a relative path, it'd just be 'Desktop/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz'

-- Let me try to do better. Arow's original post was correct, except that, if you run the command as root, '~' expands to /root/blah and doesn't work. If you run it as normal user (which is what Arow was assuming) then '~' expands to /home/USER/blah. So I wasn't saying to leave of the tilde (which results in a non-existent absolute path) - only saying that the tilde expands relative to the user using it. HTH.

I have succesfully installed flashplayer. Thank you for your help. The answer was in the info that flashplayer supplied but I didn't know how to use it. By reading your suggestions and doing a bit more thinking the penny dropped on how to get this to work.
I had to enter a terminal and type in ls to list the available directories. From here I had to do cd as root to get into the directory 'install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz'. Once I was able to start the process it was pretty self explanatory.
Thanks again Richard