Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!husc6!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Archive at 128.163.128.6
Keywords: tar, archive
Message-ID: <10207@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 4 May 89 13:47:13 GMT
References: <2199@wpi.wpi.edu>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 10

In article <2199@wpi.wpi.edu> dseah@wpi.wpi.edu (David I Seah) writes:
>files availiable via anonymous ftp at 128.163.128.6 are compressed somehow.

*.Z files are usually "compress"ed and need to be unpacked by "uncompress"
or, as you did, by "zcat" (both are just links to "compress").  The
compression scheme is basically LZW.

In order to avoid unpacking the whole thing, you can use a pipeline:
	zcat kermit.tar.Z | tar tvf -	# to view the table of contents
	zcat kermit.tar.Z | tar xf - names...	# to extract selected files