-z
Packs the resulting archive with gzip
-j
Compresses the resulting archive with bzip2
-v
Lists les processed
The archive les created by tar end with .tar. If the tar archive was also com-
pressed using gzip, the ending is .tgz or .tar.gz. If it was compressed using
bzip2, the ending is .tar.bz2.
locate patterns
This command is only available if you have installed the findutils-locate pack-
age. The locate command can nd in which directory a specied le is located.
If desired, use wild cards to specify lenames. The program is very fast, because
it uses a database specically created for the purpose (rather than searching
through the entire le system). This very fact, however, also results in a major
drawback: locate is unable to nd any les created after the latest update of its
database. The database can be generated by root with updatedb.
updatedb [options]
This command performs an update of the database used by locate. To include
les in all existing directories, run the program as root. It also makes sense to
place it in the background by appending an ampersand (&), so you can immedi-
ately continue working on the same command line (updatedb &). This command
usually runs as a daily cron job (see cron.daily).
find [options]
With find, search for a le in a given directory. The rst argument species the
directory in which to start the search. The option -name must be followed by a
search string, which may also include wild cards. Unlike locate, which uses a
database, find scans the actual directory.
17.12.1.2 Commands to Access File Contents
file [options] [files]
With file, detect the contents of the specied les.
-z
Tries to look inside compressed les
cat [options] files
The cat command displays the contents of a le, printing the entire contents to
the screen without interruption.
-n
Numbers the output on the left margin
218 Start-Up
