.tar extension help

[DanielBigelow1]

Hello,

I'm trying to open some land cover data in Arc that has a .tar file extension. As far as I can tell from online documentation and forums, this extension means that the files are compressed and need to be extracted. Could anyone give me a pointer on how to go about extracting the data? Specifically, can i do this in Arc? I'm working in a university computer lab, so I can't download any extraction programs such as 7zip. Any help would be much appreciated.

Data can be found here: http://www.fsl.orst.edu/pnwerc/wrb/dwnld_lulc1990.html, the first option being the one I'm trying to use.

Best,

Dan

[MelitaKennedy]

Hi Dan,

Does the computer have any type of zip program? They should all support tar files. A tar file is just a collection of files; not really compressed. A tar could then be compressed using a zip or compress program. This one appears to have been compressed with WinZip or something similar after the files were collected together into a tar file.

See if MKS is installed by opening a DOS window and typing tar. If you get a command usage line back, type

tar -tvf C:\path\to\file\filename.tar

or

tar -tvf filename.tar

if you're in the same directory as the file to see the files inside the tar file.

To extract the files:

tar -xvf filename.tar C:\path\to\where\you\want\the\raster

The tar command is a unix/linux command so if you have a colleague who uses linux, ask them to extract the file. (the data's about 25mb, so a little big to email around)

Melita