Anyway, I came home and tried to install EchoLink on a recently received box with Windows XP SP2 and found the installer would start up and then just fails, it terminates with no message, no event in the Event Log, nothing …

Searching around I found the note about the InstallShield 16 bit installer not being happy with the %Temp% and %tmp% folders having names like C:\Documents and Settings\Fred\local settings\temp (or whatever it is – I just made that up but it doesn’t like having spaces in the name.

I went to the Control Panel/System/Advanced/Environment Variables and changed both tmp and temp for both “User Variables” and “System Variables” to be c:/tmpfiles and problem fixed … Any name less than eight characters is probably ok.

There was also a problem with MusicMatch V7.5 not installing (same symptoms) but this was related to Internet Explorer V7 – deinstalling that and it was happy too.

This is a new PC and I’m discovering just how much software is (was) installed and how little I use on a daily basis :-(

Tips on using TAR

If you’re trying to add large numbers of files (eg with wildcards) and get:

> bash: /usr/bin/tar: Argument list too long

Use -T (–files-from) option, e.g.:

find /path/to/bitmaps -name ‘*.bmp’ | tar cfT archive -

the “-” at the end tells Tar to take its input from Stdin.

Encrypting TAR Backups

tar cf – secretdir | gpg -c > destdir/mysecretfiles.tar.gpg