Re: [Bug-tar] suggestion re: 'MEMBER'

[Dave Lampton]

FWIW, it was also frustratingly unclear that if I am in directory A and there is an archive in that directory, and I want to extract that archive to directory B which is somewhere else, I cannot run tar from directory A. I was assuming there would be some output option to extract it to wherever I want, but no.  Eventually I figured out that I have to be in directory B and then run tar from there, referring back to the archive file in directory A.  This was not obvious, and it seems like an odd limitation.

On Mon, Oct 8, 2018 at 10:45 PM Dave Lampton <address@hidden> wrote:

At the top of the man page for 'tar', there are many references to the argument 'MEMBER' but then it's not defined anywhere.

It took quite a bit of reading before I was able to deduce that it must simply be some file/directory that's already inside an existing archive.

(Which finally explains why it's only available to the --list and --extract operations.)

It just sure would've been nice if it explicitly stated that at the beginning somewhere.

thanks.