I was wondering whether anyone can help me recover a problem.

My initial aim was to tar up a folder which contained many many photos for archiving on my own computer.

I logged in via SSH and *I think* ran the command:
tar -cvf pics.tar /location/to/folder/i/want/tarred

when it completed, i checked out my ftp area and it seemed that all the files that I tarred up had turned into compressed files themselves effectively creating a tarred tar of files.... does anyone know what happened and how I can resolve this? I tried extracting the tar but it just extracted all of the compressed images...

thanks.

With that command you would have made /location/to/folder/i/want/tarred into "pics.tar" in your WORKING DIRECTORY. Is that not what you wanted? All your pics in a compressed file? tar -xvf pics.tar will extract them when you need them again.

After reading it again... all your individual pictures seem to be tarred seperately?

Try this ---> tar -xvf pics.tar;mv pics.tar pics.temp;tar -xvf *.tar

thank you for your reply :)

I have just tried entering that command into SSH and it has extracted as normal, but then when its finished I get the following error.
tar: *.tar: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

I am in my own base area where the pics.tar file is.

edit: also.. the files extraced are .gz files if that helps.
ie "Picture 063.jpg.gz"

Sorry for double post but I cant edit previous post:

After trying to do that last command within a folder with .gz files inside I get the following:

tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: 2004_0812devon0004.jpg.gz: Not found in archive
which means... hrmm...

Sorry for double post but I cant edit previous post:

After trying to do that last command within a folder with .gz files inside I get the following:

tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: 2004_0812devon0004.jpg.gz: Not found in archive
which means... hrmm...

edit again!

i used gunzip *.gz within a folder and it unzipped them... i guess i used gzip... :S sorry!

does anyone know how I can do that to all the folders instead of manually within each folder? i have around 40...

Use this command:

gzip -d ./*/*.gz

This may be helpful to...

mkdir ~/pictures;mv ./*/*.jpg ~/pictures


that will create a pictures directory in your home directory then move all your jpg's to it so you don't have them in their own seperate directories anymore.

Thank You Very Much for Your Help :)
It all worked and I have my pictures working as normal! :peace: