Kieren Searle

tar doesn’t seem to like using wild cards. If you are trying to decompress multiple files in one go you might try a command like:

kieren@home:~/archives> tar -xf *.tar

However, this produces multiple errors, one for each file that the wild card matches:

tar: archive1.tar: Not found in archive
tar: archive2.tar: Not found in archive
tar: archive3.tar: Not found in archive
tar: archive4.tar: Not found in archive
tar: archive5.tar: Not found in archive

A quick solution is to use a loop to decompress them one at a time like so:

for archive in *.tar ; do tar -xf archive ; done