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I have many files like these
SomeDirectory/RandomName.spa
SomeDirectory/AnotherRandomName.spa
SomeDirectory/YetAnotherRandomName.spa
...
I want to unpack every .spa file in SomeDirectory to their each seperate folders, with the same name. I would use something like - tar -xvf, but with what attributes?
Afterwards I want to pack every folder in SomeDirectory again back to RandomName.spa, (keeping the name of folder). The command would be tar -cvf, but with what attributes?
Assuming that (1) the .spa files are actually .tar archives, (2) you are in SomeDirectory, and (3) that directories with the names of the archives you want to extract do not exist, the following piece of code should achieve what you want:
for a in *.spa
do a_dir=`expr $a : '\(.*\).spa'`
mkdir $a_dir
tar -xvf $a -C $a_dir;
done
Or in case you prefer a one-liner:
for a in *.spa; do a_dir=`expr $a : '\(.*\).spa'`; mkdir $a_dir; tar -xvf $a -C $a_dir; done
The first line in the for loop strips the .spa from the archive name and assigns it to a variable, which is used in the second line to make a directory with that name, and in the third line in tar with the -C argument.
The -C argument in tar only changes directory during extraction and doesn't actually make one, making things a a bit more complicated than they should be.
Credit: This answer is a slight modification of https://superuser.com/a/748567/226246
tar? If not, then I'd suggest doing so. In a Terminal typetarand then control-click it selecting "Open man Page". Then if you're still confused, edit your question and try describing in better detail.*.spafiles are actually tar archives? What happens if you runtar -xvf RandomName.spa?