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From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Help me uncompress Smail
Message-ID: <1991Mar16.172245.25670@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 16 Mar 91 17:22:45 GMT
References: <294.27e0a63d@beach.gal.utexas.edu>
Organization: Chinet - Chicago Public Access UNIX
Lines: 18

In article <294.27e0a63d@beach.gal.utexas.edu> perry@beach.gal.utexas.edu (John Perry  KG5RG) writes:
>
>	I know this may be the wrong group to post this in but... We got the
>smail package from uunet.uu.net but are having trouble breaking it apart. It is
>in compress format but being that we are new to compress and uncompress, all we
>can do is to uncompress it into one HUGE text file. Is this how it is supposed
>to be? Any help would be greatly appreciated. BTW it is in .Z format.

It is most likely a tar file so you can either uncompress and then run
 tar xf file
or do it in one step with:
 zcat file.Z | tar xf -
Either way will tell tar to extract the individual files and directories.
Under SysV you might want to add the "o" option to the tar command to
make sure the extracted files are owned by you.

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us