>I've just started to learn scripts, and am have a problem with tar.
>It seems that tar returns a value of 0 irrespective of the tar being successfull of unsuccessfull. This makes it difficult to verify that the tar actullly worked.
>Does anyone know how to verify if a tar was successfull?
>
>Regards
>Sanesh

You can run tar with the v ("verbose") switch, then it displays all the file 
names with paths of the extracted files.

tar xzvf some-archive.tar.gz | more

extracts a tar/gzip archive, displaying the file names and paths, pausing so you
can see one screenful at a time.  Using t instead of x will just list what would
be extracted without actually extracting anything.

I have no experience with any BSD, am trying to decide if I can install NetBSD
on present computer or new computer I am shopping for.  I have experience with
Linux, and believe tar, or at least its main functions, behaves about the same
across all Unixes.