A brief look at directory structure
Yes it makes perfect sense, what I'm wondering is how you could manage to actually download a file and extract its contents somewhere without knowing where. I usually extract files which I will only be working with for a short while, such as installation files, to my
/home/anti-trend/tmp directory. When I'm done doing what I need to do, I just nuke the contents of the entire folder:
Code:
rm -rf /home/anti-trend/tmp/*
...then again, perhaps I
can think of a way you might have managed to extract the files without knowing where they went. If the OOo walkthrough you were following explained how to extract the installation archive from the CLI, they probably would have had you type something like this:
Code:
tar xzvf OOoArchiveName2.0.tar.gz
...am I right? In that case, that's like telling the system "I want you to extract the contents of this archive right into the directory I am currently typing this from." It also means that if the contents of the archive contained folders, those were extracted too. So what I'm basically saying is that the files you are looking for may be contained in a directory
inside whatever directory where you extracted everything. Let me present a generic example:
A brief look at directory structure
First of all, please think of browsing a directory structure as if you're
there, moving from inside one directory to another. You are in your
home directory, which in our example is
/home/Someone28624 and contains a compressed archive called
testdummy.tar.gz .* The
testdummy.tar.gz archive contains a program we want to install,
Test Dummy Pro 2.0. The installation files are contained within the archive, so first we must uncompress its contents. We run the command:
Code:
tar xzvf testdummy.tar.gz
...since we are currently 'located' in
/home/Someone28624/ and we did not specify a location to extract the files, the files are extracted right into the directory with us. Now we want to see what files we've uncompressed, so we 'list' the contents of our current directory with the list command:
The system obliges and gives us some verbosity:
Code:
Documents/
letter_to_aunt_ruth.txt
testdummyinstaller/
tmp/
If you will notice, the directory 'Documents' has a forward-slash (
/ ) immediately after it, but the regular file 'letter_to_aunt_ruth.txt' does not. This helps us tell the difference between a directory and a regular file at a glance. Also, there is a new directory,
testdummyinstaller/ inside your
/home/Someone28624/ directory. Since there are no installation files in the directory with us, just our Documents and that stray letter to Aunt Ruth we never finished, we can assume the files are probably inside that new directory that just came into being (
/home/Someone28624/testdummyinstaller/). Let's go into that directory:
Now that we're inside
/home/Someone28624/testdummyinstaller/ we can take a look around:
Again the system obliges our request and gives us a list of all the files in the directory with us:
Code:
test_dummy_install_file_01.rpm
test_dummy_install_file_02.rpm
test_dummy_install_file_03.rpm
test_dummy_install_file_04.rpm
test_dummy_install_file_05.rpm
Yep, it looks like our install files alright. (Yes, it's weird that the installer is broken up into so many seperate parts, much like that of OOo *hint*hint*, but keep in mind that not everybody that works with software has the same amount of talent.)
Anyway, this is a generic example with a lot of made up info, but I hope I have adequately explained a bit about how directories work, at least enough to get you back on track.
* tar.gz is more or less the UNIX equivilent of a zip file.
