Extracting .tar.gz Archives

epkg has the ability to extract .tar.gz Archives. This makes it extremely easy to install new Encaps, since you can do it all in one step. Instead of extracting the archive manually into /usr/local/encap and then invoking epkg, you can simply say epkg sed-3.02.tar.gz. This will tell epkg to extract the new archive into the Encap Source Directory, remove the symbolic links for any old versions of the package, and install the symbolic links for the new version.

Note that epkg can be configured at compile time to use the libtar and zlib libraries so that no external binaries are needed. The precompiled binaries of epkg which are available from the epkg web page were configured this way. However, if epkg is built without this code, your system's tar and gzip binaries must be in your path when you invoke epkg.


Mark D. Roth <roth@uiuc.edu>