Specifying tmp for tar

[Ed Greshko]

Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 01/09/2007, Mikkel L. Ellertson <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com> wrote:
>> Dotan Cohen wrote:
>>> I have a 2 GB bz2 archive that unzips to over 10 GB (wikipedia dump).
>>> Although I have over 50 GB free in /home, / has only about 8 GB free.
>>> Thus, as tar uses /tmp, the / filesystem fills up and I cannot
>>> continue. How can I specify a tmp directory for tar in my home
>>> directory? Note that man tar makes no mention of a tmp option.
>>>
>>> Thanks in advance.
>>>
>>> Dotan Cohen
>>>
>> Dumb question - does it help to create a /tmp directory in your home
>> directory and run "export TMP=$home/tmp"? (I don't remember if bzip2
>> and tar honor TMP.)
>>
>> Mikkel
> 
> Thanks, but that did not work either. The / filesystem did not fill
> up, but I got this error:
> 
> ubuntu at ubuntu-laptop:~/Desktop$ tar xjf enwiki-20070802-pages-articles.xml.bz2
> tar: This does not look like a tar archive
> tar: Skipping to next header
> tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
> ubuntu at ubuntu-laptop:~/Desktop$
> 
> Maybe the archive is bad?

Maybe it isn't even an archive?

What does "file enwiki-20070802-pages-articles.xml.bz2" return?

What happens if you try "bunzip2 enwiki-20070802-pages-articles.xml.bz2" ?

-- 
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