Almost all the distributions come with a utility called Midnite Commander. To
invoke it, type mc at the console or in some kind of xterm. It's layout is
typical of file utilities, with 2 windows and a set of hotkeys at the bottom
and menus at the top.
It has something called a virtual file system. If you tap enter with the
highlight bar on a tarball or zip file, it will call the appropriate utility
and uncompress/untar it to a temp file and show the contents of the file to
you in one of the panels just like it was part of the file system. Now you
can browse subdirectories stored in the archive and even press F3 to view the
readme file or install.txt file that comes with most archives. Now that you
have some instructions on how to install the file, you can go back up in the
directory tree and use mc to copy the directory and all subs to whereever you
need it to go. For example, say I had a file named slug.tar.gz (or slug.zip).
After browsing it with mc and finding that install.txt (in a subdirectory
called /slug) recommends putting the app/files under /usr/local, I could go
back to highlighting the slug subdirectory in the one pane/window, and then
use the other one to switch to directory /usr/local. Now I switch back to
the other pane and press F5 for copy. The subdirectory and everything
underneath it is uncompressed and copied to /usr/local.
Hope this helps....
Both Gnome file manager and Krusader were modeled after midnite commander,
and they will do approximately the same thing.
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