Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 16:57:43 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: "Colin W. Glenn" <cwg01 AT gnofn DOT org>
cc: Gurunandan R Bhat <grbhat AT unigoa DOT ernet DOT in>, djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: tar for DJGPP
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970129000050.14917A-100000@sparkie.gnofn.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970130165035.18666C-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII


On Wed, 29 Jan 1997, Colin W. Glenn wrote:

> creator of this tutor has made available his sources in the form of two
> TAR's, great, wonderfull, something to print out!  BAD NEWS, it's *inx
> filenames and paths.  Can't unload it to one dir, or even to the tree, DOS
> would corrupt the names.  Solution, write QBasic program to get each file
> from the archive as it's needed, find out what the resulting DOS name is,
> use it, and when finished, delete it.  Hence, multiple DeTar'ing in one
> sitting, as I said, up to 160 access's to the TAR.

You should definitely check out DJTAR (it should be in your bin/ 
subdirectory).  It has the following features that can help you out:

	1) It can untar an archive even though some of the filenames 
there are illegal on MSDOS.  It will make some filename conversions 
automatically and where several converted filenames map to the same name, 
it will prompt for an alternative name.  You can even create a filename 
mapping file and submit it to DJTAR, so it converts the name as you want 
them.

	2) It can untar only some of the files, and it can write them to 
the standard output, so you can redirect them, or pipe them through a 
pager if you need to browse a single file.

So you can either untar the whole package using the first feature, or 
each time you need one or more files untar them and pipe them to a pager 
(such as `more' or `less') using the second feature.

DJTAR is documented on the utils.inf info file.  To read it, type this 
from the DOS prompt:

	info utils djtar