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

[David S. Jackson]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2001 at 09:37:47AM -0500 Chris Bergeron <cbergeron at bassemail.com> 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?

As was said before, it's up to you.  But /usr/local is primarily
for your independent compiles and additions.  This is normallly
passed over when you upgrade your system, so system-independent
things are usually safe in there.  If you like to use bleeding
edge software that you compile yourself, it's good to keep it out
of the way in /usr/local/* or elsewhere.

Since so much of what you will download will probably be in tar
or tar.gz form, it's good to have a strategy for different types
of downloads.  If you download themes for X, you could put them
in one place.  If you download tarballs of movies, art, sounds,
baby pictures, or even directory structures, you ought to have
some generic sort of place where you can stash these until you
decide what to do with them.  

Sometimes, some well-conceived variables can help here.  For
example, I usually use the blackbox window manager, so I untar my
blackbox themes with tar xvfz theme.tar.gz -C $bb where $bb
expands to /home/dsj/.blackbox.  If I've got pictures from one of
my family members in either tar or zip or whatever format, I can
uncompress them using a different variable, such as -C $pix for
pictures, -C $uls for /usr/local/src, or -C $dl for
~/tmp/downloads, where I then figure out what to do with it
eventually.  You could make $p_h for ~/public_html if that works
for you.

I also keep an ~/apps directory around, for those oddball
applications that are either too small or too experimental to
warrant putting in /usr/local/.  For example, since I run FreeBSD
most of the time, I may not want to put Linux Java runtimes in
/usr/local, but they still can run fine in a limited JRE
environment in my home directory.  For these types of goodies, I
just confine them to my home directory.

Anyway, you mainly want to separate things that will not play
nicely with your day-to-day system.  If you want to separate
things further as I have, then do that too.  It's your system, so
you can do whatever serves you best.

HTH!

-- 
David S. Jackson                        dsj at dsj.net
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Now is the time for all good men to come to.
		-- Walt Kelly

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