On Sun, 26 Feb 2006, Brian Hurt wrote:

> On Sun, 26 Feb 2006, Ed Wilts wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Feb 26, 2006 at 08:36:39AM -0600, Jordan Peacock wrote:
>>> Quick question: I have a whole ton of .tar files I need to extract,
>>> but when I try 'tar -xvf *.tar' it doesn't work.... what am I doing
>>> wrong?
>>
>> Try:
>>
>> find . -name '*.tar' -exec tar xvf {} \;
>
> That will extract all tar files in the current directory and all
> directories under it.  Which may be the behavior desired- but may not be.
> My for loop only extracts the tar files in the current directory.


Right.  And you have to be careful with tar files about what they are 
putting out.  One might have contents that write over those of another 
one.  Does each one produce a unique directory and put all files in that 
directory?  The for loop is safer, but you should know before you run it 
what those tar files contain.

Mike