[SOLVED] xz compression questions

Runing slackware64-13.1 and 13.1 on other boxes. I want to read this tar file and tried untarring it to my flash drive:

bash-4.1$ tar -C /media/disk/tagfiles -zxvf tagfiles.tar
gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

What does this mean? Can most files be compressed and uncompressed with .txz or xz utilities?

The tar archive isn't compressed with gzip, so you don't need the 'z' option.

tar -C /media/disk/tagfiles -xvf tagfiles.tar

Originally Posted by NightSky bash-4.1$ tar -C /media/disk/tagfiles -zxvf tagfiles.tar gzip: stdin: not in gzip format tar: Child returned status 1 tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now What does this mean?

Just use

tar -C /media/disk/tagfiles -xvf tagfiles.tar

Note the filename is tagfiles.tar - not tagfiles.tar.gz

Thank you sooo much.