In message <00121704172003.00751@buttercup>, you write:
> On Sunday 17 December 2000 02:15, Thomas Mueller wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Actually, in Solaris and IRIX you can't use the -z flag, so you have to 
> gunzip first and then use -tar -xvf.  I guess it's the same for other Unixes.

More appropriately, on systems that don't have GNUtar installed
you don't have the -z flag.  Linux and NetBSD both use GNUtar and
it is often one of the earlier packages I install on a new Solaris
system.

When you don't have GNUtar, but you do have gzip, you can use:

gzip -dc foo.tar.gz | tar -xvf -

if you don't want to have the uncompressed tarball on your filesystem
(on boxen w/o gnutar).

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson@bl.org