Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks, Second Edition

Using GNU tar

For Unix software that does not involve resource forks or creator types, gnutar and gzip can be used to create a .tar.gz or .tgz tarball. This type of tarball preserves paths, permissions, symbolic links, as well as authentication and compression. Tools to uncompress the tarball are available for many platforms.

The automated creation of such a tarball can be worked into the same makefile that is used to build the software. Preservation of resource forks is tricky, but possible, in this method. For example, the following command preserves Macintosh resource forks (where foo/ is a directory):

$ tar -pczf foo.tgz foo/

Every good tarball has a single top-level directory that contains everything else. You should not create tarballs that dump their contents into the current directory. To install software packaged this way, use the following command:

$ tar -pxzf foo.tgz

This simply unpacks the tarball into the file and directory structure that existed prior to packaging. Basically, it reverses the packing step. This method can be used to write files to the appropriate places on the system, such as /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/lib, /usr/local/man, /usr/local/include, and so on.

Warning

When creating packages, you should keep your package contents out of directories such as /etc, /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /usr/include, or any top-level directory reserved for the operating system, since you have no way of knowing what a future software update or Mac OS X upgrade will include. For example, ...