Linux

• I needed to extract a single file from a tarball or tar file. The following line is what I used to complete this.

sudo tar -C subdir_1/ -zxvf my_etc.tar etc/aliases

The break down:

• tar – the command
• -C – tells the command that you want to put it someplace else. In this case a existing directory called “subdir_1”.
• -zxvf – tells the command to z (unzip, because this was compressed when the tar was created), x (extract), v(verbose, repeat back what process was performed), f(file, the object is will be working with)
• my_etc.tar – the compressed tarball I am pulling the file from
• etc/aliases – the file “aliases” I want to extract is in the “etc/” directory.

For local testing purposes I installed Apache2, PHP5 and MySQL on a copy of Linux Mint. Using the Software Manager I was able to install everything quickly. Being new at this I needed to find out where localhost or the www folder was exactly. It is located off the root in the var folder.

I wanted to put my own quick “Hello world.php” file in there but did not have permissions. Here is the command line I used to fix that. Open Terminal and type in the following command.

sudo chmod -R 777 /var/www

This means Super User do change there permissions in reclusive order to read, write and execute on the root slash www folder.