un-TARring a bunch of files at once

grapnell · 02-12-2006, 08:07 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

dive · 02-12-2006, 08:34 AM

Hi, somthing like this should do it:

First do ls > filelist
Then make a script

Code:

#!/bin/bash
gawk -F= '

function untar()
{
print "tar -xzvf " $1 | "sh";
}
{
if($1 != "filelist") untar()
}

END { close("sh") }' filelist

chmod +x it and run in same folder

grapnell · 02-12-2006, 08:35 AM

thanks that worked great, but it still seems there should be an easier way to do it.

Thanks for your help this will at least help me out now.
Jeff

dive · 02-12-2006, 08:50 AM

Yes I had the same problem with tar but didn't find an easy way out, but if you cp it to a dir in your path it should work just by typing the command, so long as fileist exists in the working dir

homey · 02-12-2006, 09:07 AM

How about something like this...

for i in *.gz; do tar -xzvf $i; done