Re: [Closed REQ 5347]: Geomview for X11 in Linux

["Tim Rowley" <trowley>]

>   I have been having some problems getting the software to run.  
> I am new to Unix and have only used the .gz  compression 
> format.  Using Gzip made a 9 meg file named geomview, but
> it would not execute in Xwindows.  Using uncompress also made
> a 9 meg file but it also did not execute in unix.  
> I believe that a directory full of files should appear if I 
> decompressed the program correctly.  
>   I did try tar, but I could not figure out how to use it. 

Geomview is distributed in ".tar.Z" format, which is a compressed
UNIX tape archive.  The ".gz" which you are familiar with is a
newer, better compression method.  The command to uncompress ".Z"
files is "uncompress", but "gzip" works as well.  Uncompressing
the ".tar.Z" file will leave you with a ".tar" file, which is a
collection of multiple files joined together.  The "tar" command
is used to extract the files from the archive.  The options used
to extract files are "xvf".

So, to extract all the files, do either:

% uncompress geomview-linux.tar.Z
% tar xvf geomview-linux.tar

OR (combining into one step -- the unix way :)

% uncompress < geomview-linux.tar.Z | tar xvf -

This will unpack the contents of the archive file into a
subdirectory named `Geomview'.

I sympathize with not being able to figure out "tar" -- it's a
fairly odd program with many options.  However, if you wantt to
get into UNIX, you should master it.  The options which are most
useful to read about are [xcvtf].  Good luck!


--
Tim Rowley  --  trowley at geom.umn.edu  --  "Do or do not, there is no try."