[ale] best place to untar/unzip a file?

James P. Kinney III jkinney at localnetsolutions.com
Tue Nov 20 10:50:43 EST 2001


It depends on what you are working on and how organized your system is.

I download everything to ~/Downloads. I don't log in as root, just a
user.

I check the tar.gz to see where it is going to park itself tar tvzf
somefile.tar.gz | more.

Most tarballs are going to start with a new directory named something
that is appropriate to the contents. 

I also have a bin, etc, lib, and src directories in my home directory.
These are for things that are for me only and not system related. 

After I do a test compile (configure, make, no make install) and test
the binary, I'll park the tarball in the appropriate src directory,
~/src for my stuff, /usr/local/src for non-distribution system stuff. As
I use a (mostly) rpm-based system, I also have an archive in
/usr/src/redhat/. Once I've moved the tarball, I'll do a final make/make
install (or rpm -ba specfile.spec) from the permanent home.

I also have a /usr/local/old-src where I move stuff to when I get an
upgraded version. In that I tar cvjf old-prog-dir.tar.bz2 old-prog-dir/
with the binaries from the last make, any modification/tweaks noted in a
README.local file.

I don't keep old src files in my home directory. There's only so many
hard drives I can pack into this box :)

On Tue, 2001-11-20 at 09:37, Chris Bergeron wrote:
> 
> Where is the "proper" (for lack of a better word) place to untar or
> unzip an archive?  I've been downloading to /tmp and then ungziptaring
> them into subdirectories under /tmp/.  I configure, make, make install,
> and then just sit tight until the files that aren't being accessed get
> dumped from /tmp.  Is this the right way or should I put them under
> /usr/local?  
> 
> Can anyone shed light on this?
> 
> Thanks...
> -CB
> 
> 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and COO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
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