R: Extract or List Tar Archives

untar {utils} | R Documentation

## Extract or List Tar Archives

### Description

Extract files from or list 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. 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) 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 are 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.

### 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 ..., and long path and link names are only used as from R 2.15.3. 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.

### 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`, invisibly.

### See Also

`tar`, `unzip`.

[Package utils version 3.1.2 Index]