Marine Geology Data

Tar Acquisition & Extraction Instructions

How do I get the data?

Data are available as multiple ASCII files, or in the form of a single "tar archive" file for an entire data set. You can click on a "[tar]" file and a filter window will appear allowing you to download the tar file to any directory location/file name that you specify on your local machine.

So what's a tar file?

Tar is a sticky, gooey, viscous format. Multiple data files are stuck together into a "tar" file for purposes of transmission or storage, much like .ZIP, .ARC, or .SEA formats. The files are NOT compressed. This means you can download a single tar file rather than 30 separate data files.

How do I get the data out of the tar file?

Macintosh

In order to untar files, you need a "tar" compatible extractor. This program is available commercially in compression packages, or you can get a shareware version by clicking here: tar.sea... This version of the untar software is distributed as a ".sea" or self extracting archive. You can ready it for execution on your Macintosh by double clicking on it from the finder. Click ok at the "creation program" screen, then click ok to extracting to "tar folder". This will create a folder for your tar file and documentation. Double click on the tape icon labelled "tar" inside this folder. Select extract from the file menu. Choose your data file and click ok. Select the folder you wish to extract to and click ok. Tar will extract all the data files in the archive.

MS DOS/PC's

Tar compatible extractors are available commercially or you can download a shareware version here: dostar.exe... After downloading tar.exe, launch it from windows or dos. This will extract two files: tar.exe and tar.man. Tar.exe is the executable tar/untar program, tar.man is documentation for the program.

To untar a file run tar.exe with the following arguments:

tar -xf filename

Where filename is the name of the file from which you wish to extract data.

Unix

You should already have tar as a part of your operating system. Documentation is available by typing "man tar" at the system prompt. If you have questions about it's location, contact your system operator. Once he/she helps you locate the tar extraction utility, you can launch it by typing:

tar -xf filename

Where filename is the name of the file from which you wish to extract data.