How to untar the source.

These notes are provided for people who are unfamiliar with the ".tar.bz2" format used for distributing the HPComm source.

In the Windows world, it's common to use a program like pkzip or WinZip to group and compress files into ".zip" files.

In the Unix world, the job of grouping files is usually done by a program called tar, and the compression is done by some separate program such as gzip or bzip2.

In the case of HPComm, first we group the files with tar, then we use bzip2 to compress them. That's why the name of the source file ends with ".tar.bz2".

For Linux and Unix users:

Most modern installations of Linux are shipped with the bzip2 program, so untarring the source should be this easy:

    bunzip2 -c HPComm-src-30r2.tar.bz2 | tar -xvf -

If bunzip2 is not installed on your system, you can obtain it from the bzip2 home page.

For Windows users:

There are two ways to untar the source code.

The long-but-recommended way:

The first method is to download Cygwin, which provides a Unix-like environment, and an almost complete set of the tools you'd expect to find under Unix. We suggest downloading and installing "full.exe" (about 14Mbytes). This will install both "tar" and "bunzip2" on your Windows PC, and you will be able to untar the source as for the Unix method. It's my understanding that long filenames, case sensitivity and line ends are correctly handled with this method.

The quick-and-dirty method:

If you only want to look at the source, and aren't interested in doing further development, here's what to do:

Download tar320g.zip and install it on your machine. You should arrange to have "tar.exe" in your PATH.
Download bzip2095d_win32.exe and install it on your machine. You should rename it to "bzip2.exe" and arrange to have this in your PATH.

Run this command:

    bzip2 -d -c HPComm-src-30r2.tar.bz2 | tar -xvf -

The source will now reside in a subdirectory called "HPComm-3".

Note that this version of tar does not support long filenames and case preservation, so you will not be able to rebuild the program from source untarred in this fashion. If you want to rebuild the source, you must use either the Unix method, or the Cygwin Windows method.

If you have any good ideas or alternative strategies to add to this page, please don't hesistate to let us know.

Mitch Davis

Last modified: Tue Sep 21 21:28:43 EST 1999