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I'm having difficulty installing things like tmux app manager and fluxbox styles. In both cases i attempt to tar into their directories ~/.tmux/plugins/tpm & ~/.fluxbox/styles like this sudo tar -xjf trinity.tar.bz2 ~/.fluxbox/styles however I get an error stating that /styles is not a directory. Same with /tpm. They are indeed there, but they are not directories. I'm very confused. Where do I unpack my tar files?

Siddharth Dushantha
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sodaTab
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  • Please excuse me if I'm missing something simple. I'm at a loss. – sodaTab Aug 02 '19 at 15:47
  • I also cannot create new /tpm /styles directories because files exist with those names already. – sodaTab Aug 02 '19 at 16:02
  • I am not sure why you are dealing with `tar` to install that software, and it seems you are using `tar` improperly. Since you are using CentOS, you can install `tmux` with the command `yum install tmux`. The `fluxblox` window manager is in the EPEL repository, so you can install that by running `yum install epel-release; yum install fluxbox`. If you really want to install from the tarballs, please describe how you are getting those files and what you are attempting to do with them (exact commands with output is the most helpful). – GracefulRestart Aug 02 '19 at 16:14
  • I have tmux and fluxbox installed already. I'm trying to install tmux plugin manager from github.com/tmux-plugins/tpm and I'm trying to install a fluxbox style (trinity.tar.bz2) Google says to just untar it to ~/.fluxbox/styles. – sodaTab Aug 02 '19 at 16:26
  • I cannot enter the /tmux/plugins/tpm directory to clone tmux plugin manager. Since it is not a directory. – sodaTab Aug 02 '19 at 16:46

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If your goal is to extract a tar archive to a specific directory, you need to pass the proper option flags. The -xjf flags only accept a single argument, the path of the archive to extract and it will extract to the current directory.

To get the behavior you are looking for, you would want to use the -C flag of tar to declare which directory it should work in:

sudo tar -C ~/.fluxbox/styles -xjf trinity.tar.bz2

GracefulRestart
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