Re: tar Extract to AS/400 IFS -- HELP !!

Hi Mike,

> I'm trying to extract apache-ant-1.6.2-bin.tar.gz to our AS/400 (V5R2) so
> that I can download and use the iText Java-PDF Library
> (http://www.lowagie.com/iText/).  The problem is I just can't seem to get
> the tar command to work properly.  There is also an
> apache-ant-1.6.2-bin.tar.bz2 archive available but I don't know if I'd have
> any better luck with that.  I'm going to try but I'm not optimistic.

What you have there is not just a "tarball" (as they call .TAR files in
Unix circles) but a Gzipped tarball.

You see, TAR is an archiving program... it doesn't compress the data, it
just combines many files/directories into one file for transit.

To get compression, they use a separate program called gzip.  That's why
the extension is ".tar.gz" the other file, the one that ends with .bz2 is
similar, but they used the bzip2 program instead of the gzip program to
handle compression.

So, to extract this TAR, you'll need the "gunzip" program to decompress
the file, then you'll be able to use "tar" to extract the files from it.
You can get an iSeries version of gunzip from the following site:

http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/enable/site/porting/iseries/overview/gnu_utilities.html

After installing gunzip, you'll type the following in Qshell:

a) gunzip apache-ant-1.6.2-bin.tar.gz
  (the result will be a larger file without a .gz at the end)

b)  tar xvf apache-ant-1.6.2-bin.tar
  (this extracts the actual archive)


There are other alternatives if you don't like the solution above.

a) use JAR or Info-Zip (InfoZip requires PASE) to extract the .ZIP
    version instead.

b) use a Linux or similar machine to gunzip the TARball, and upload
    the decompressed file to the iSeries, extract THAT with TAR. (I'm
    sure this is also possible in Windows -- in fact, I think WinZip
    can do it)

c) Unzip the whole thing on your PC, create a JAR file using your PCs
    JVM, and use JAR to extract it on the iSeries...

I'm sure there are other ways, but they're not coming to me at the moment
(and how many ways do you really need, heh)