utils (version 3.3)

untar: Extract or List Tar Archives

Description

Extract files from or list the contents of a tar archive.

Usage

untar(tarfile, files = NULL, list = FALSE, exdir = ".",
      compressed = NA, extras = NULL, verbose = FALSE,
      restore_times =  TRUE, tar = Sys.getenv("TAR"))

Arguments

tarfile

The pathname of the tar file: tilde expansion (see path.expand) will be performed. Alternatively, a connection that can be used for binary reads.

files

A character vector of recorded filepaths to be extracted: the default is to extract all files.

list

If TRUE, list the files (the equivalent of tar -tf). Otherwise extract the files (the equivalent of tar -xf).

exdir

The directory to extract files to (the equivalent of tar -C). It will be created if necessary.

compressed

logical or character string. Values "gzip", "bzip2" and "xz" select that form of compression (and may be abbreviated to the first letter). TRUE indicates gzip compression, FALSE no known compression (but an external tar command may detect compression automagically), and NA (the default) indicates that the type is inferred from the file header.

extras

NULL or a character string: further command-line flags such as -p to be passed to an external tar program.

verbose

logical: if true echo the command used.

restore_times

logical. If true (default) restore file modification times. If false, the equivalent of the -m flag. Times in tarballs are supposed to be in UTC, but tarballs have been submitted to CRAN with times in the future or far past: this argument allows such times to be discarded.

tar

character string: the path to the command to be used. If the command itself contains spaces it needs to be quoted -- but tar can also contain flags separated from the command by spaces.

Value

• If list = TRUE, a character vector of (relative or absolute) paths of files contained in the tar archive.

  Otherwise the return code from system with an external tar or 0L, invisibly.

Details

This is either a wrapper for a tar command or for an internal implementation written in R. The latter is used if tarfile is a connection or if the argument tar is "internal" or "" (except on Windows, when tar.exe is tried first).

What options are supported will depend on the tar used. Modern GNU flavours of tar will support compressed archives, and since 1.15 are able to detect the type of compression automatically: version 1.20 added support for lzma and version 1.22 for xz compression using LZMA2. OS X 10.6 and later (and FreeBSD and some other OSes) have a tar (also known as bsdtar) from the libarchive project which can also detect gzip and bzip2 compression automatically. For other flavours of tar, environment variable R_GZIPCMD gives the command to decompress gzip and compress files, and R_BZIPCMD for bzip2 files.

Arguments compressed, extras and verbose are only used when an external tar is used.

The internal implementation restores symbolic links as links on a Unix-alike, and as file copies on Windows (which works only for existing files, not for directories), and hard links as links. If the linking operation fails (as it may on a FAT file system), a file copy is tried. Since it uses gzfile to read a file it can handle files compressed by any of the methods that function can handle: at least compress, gzip, bzip2 and xz compression, and some types of lzma compression. It does not guard against restoring absolute file paths, as some tar implementations do. It will create the parent directories for directories or files in the archive if necessary. It handles the standard (USTAR/POSIX), GNU and pax ways of handling file paths of more than 100 bytes, and the GNU way of handling link targets of more than 100 bytes.

You may see warnings from the internal implementation such as unsupported entry type 'x' This often indicates an invalid archive: entry types "A-Z" are allowed as extensions, but other types are reserved. The only thing you can do with such an archive is to find a tar program that handles it, and look carefully at the resulting files. There may also be the warning using pax extended headers This is indicates that additional information may have been discarded, such as ACLs, encodings ....

The standards only support ASCII filenames (indeed, only alphanumeric plus period, underscore and hyphen). untar makes no attempt to map filenames to those acceptable on the current system, and treats the filenames in the archive as applicable without any re-encoding in the current locale.

See Also

tar, unzip.