On Dec 10, phillie_b wrote
>  i just downloaded 70 megs of source for netbsd 1.3 from the mail FTP site, my question is, im running 1.3.1 will these sources work for 1.3.1 as 1.3?  the reason im asking is im new to unix basically.

Yes, they sould work. But this mean you'll be downgrading your system to 1.3
when you'll start recompiling things. You'd be better downloading
1.3.2, at last for the kernel part.

> also what command should i run to unpack the .tgz files?  is it: "gunzip syssrc.tgz | ypcat | tar xpf-; cd /"  is that the one i use or is the syntax different than that?  please help.

What does the ypcat do here ? It's completely unrelatted (it's part of the
NIS software, which allows sharing of passwd, group, etc ... databases
accross machines). 
The real command would be:
gunzip -c syssrc.tgz | (cd /; tar xvf -)

syssrc.tgz contains an archive created with tar, which has then been
compressed with gzip. "gunzip -c syssrc.tgz " uncompress it and put the result
on the standart output (zcat syssrc.tgz would do the same). "tar xvf - "
extracts the archive it reads on his standart input. The 'cd /' is here to 
put the extracted files at the rigth place. Of course you can't to
'cd /' before gunzip  because it would not find the syssrc.tgz file (unless
you put it in /). The '|' (called 'pipe') redirects the standart output of
the left command to the standart input of the rigth command. The '()' start a
new shell before executing the commands, so that the 2 parts of the pipe can
be run with different current directory.

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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