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Even better
Authored by: Anonymous on May 16, '02 09:52:44AM
Even better:

unix% man tar

Giving convoluted and/or incorrect examples (thanks to the first followup post for better tar usage) as an introduction to a specific UNIX command isn't a complete tip. It would help to include information on where to go to find more information. The UNIX manual pages are the probably the best ways to find out what UNIX commands are, what they do, and how they work. For an introduction to the UNIX manual system, try this command:

unix% man man


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Re: Even better
Authored by: kwalker on May 16, '02 10:09:58AM

To be fair, though, many of the unix man pages (including the tar man page) are terse and could benefit from some examples.



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Re: Even better
Authored by: Anonymous on May 16, '02 11:27:37AM
Absolutely! The 'tar' examples posted were just bad examples. The man pages do contain good info about additional options, etc. If someone who was not a strong UNIX user didn't know about the 'tar' man page, they might never know what else 'tar' could do. That's why I thought it should have been mentioned. Examples are probably the best initial learning tool, still.

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re man
Authored by: brownpw on May 17, '02 01:03:50AM

Dud, have you tried to read the man entry for tar? Maybe it's just the ADHD , but I have neither the desire or the time. For *real* world help on any command, you should always start with the -help option, almost every normally used command has one. For this example, you could just use:

% tar -help

which will produce something that you can actually *use*:

[localhost:~] brownpw% tar -help
tar: illegal option -- l
usage: tar -{txru}[cevfbmopswzBHLPXZ014578] [tapefile] [blocksize] [replstr] [-C directory] file1 file2...

Notice that even though the tar command doesn't have the -help option available to the user, it still fails over to give you the info you need. Some would suggest that this is bad form, but my boss would suggest that I get my work done and not waist all day reading overly confusing and exhaustive man pages, like the one that is given for tar.



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