Perhaps I'm missing something as well, but having the for loop iterate over the results of 'ls -l' doesn't seem like it'd work, as it would try to untar things like '-rw-rw-r--' and 'Oct'. Perhaps 'ls' would be more appropriate. Heck, you could even leave the external program out of it. 
for file in *tar; do tar xvf $file; done

[download]

thor

Update:Yeah, I'm an idiot. "ell-ess dash ell" ne "ell-ess dash one". *shrugs*

In reply to Re: Re: Re: untarring number of files by thor
in thread untarring number of files by agent

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