opening tar files
 

hi, still a newbie, and wondering what the command is to open a tar file. i'm using mandrake. thanks.

if the file is just .tar you have to use: (just concatenated)
% tar -xf your_file.tar

but if it is .tar.gz you have to use (concatenated and zipped)
% tar -xzf your_file.tar.gz

Why are you using tar in mandrake what about an rpm?

Don't discourage the OP, tar is a necessary tool to learn.

and isnt it almost always better to install from souce code?

well, most of the time yes. i would certainly recommend it, with a few reservations. organization is probably the biggest problem. when you install from source it's very hard to keep track of what you installed and where it all is, and if you later decide to uninstall something it can be a real pain for that reason. i use slackware, which has a tool called slackpkg to keep track of all that. it still installs things from source, but when you get .tgz, where normally you would run

./configure
make
make install

instead you run

./configure
checkinstall
slackpkg install youprogram-3.4.tgz


i think, i may be confusing some of the syntax, but anyway, it's been pretty easy to use and really made installing from source a whole lot less hassle and more fun. now i can type slackpkg and get a list of every package installed on my system, and removing one is one click away. if you're not using slackware, then i'd look into swaret or wget or something similar. i haven't tried those, though.


EDIT: whoops! just read over your post again and you are most definitely not using slackware. do some research on swaret, that's probably your best bet for mandrake, but as a word of advice: i started on mandrake too, and it was great for getting my feet wet and all that. if you're into installing source packages on the command line though, there's a good chance you're interested in _learning linux_, in which case, once you're comfortable in mandrake, throw it out and install slackware. that's what i did, and i've never looked back. just my two cents.