My environment is Ubuntu 14.04, the latest one anyway, perhaps 16.04 I don't know. It is a problem that has plagued me for years. I need to download and copy a C directory with GNU license, etc that contains perhaps a hundred code files. The directory is in a tarball file .tgz or .zip. I download it all right, it ends up in Downloads directory in my laptop and I can open it up by clicking on the thumbnail and I see all the files but I cannot get into it through the terminal. If I try cd directoryName.tgz or directoryName.zip it says it is not a directory. I can rename the directory leaving the files extension out but it does not help. I really cannot move it anywhere, can copy individual files only which is a chore and I simply at a loss what to do. Please help. Thanks, - A.

P.S. The same thing is Win-10.

Seriously??? YEARS on this?

A .tgz or .zip file is A FILE...not a directory. Until you UNzip it, you can't do anything with it. The file manager will let you view the contents, but only VIEW...to modify/change, you have to extract. And if you're in the file manager, why can't you select multiple files???

Did you try running "unzip <name of zip file>", or "tar xvfz <name of .tgz/tar.gz file>", and see what it does???? Very first hit in Google for "how to unzip a file in linux" is:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/86849...m-the-terminal

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As stated the file browser creates a virtual directory when you click on the tar/zip file where you can view the directories/files inside and extract one or everything as desired. This allows you to view the contents without actually extracting them which can be very convenient. If you want to use the termnal to access the contents then you have to really extract them either by the browser or tar/unzip command.

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Thank you very much. Unzip worked. very simple. Stupid me. - Alex