This is a really lame problem. I've been using Red Hat and red hat based distros for a while and I finally just got sick of rpm hell, and the bloatyness. So I just installed slack 8.0, and so far I really like it, but I've run into a strange problem.

it sems like gunzip doesn't work for any tarballs i've downloaded from the web. I can still extract the tarballs from kde by double clicking on the file and copying the contents to another directory but I would really, really, really like to do this thru the CLI.

when i type:

gunzip tarball.tar.gz
I get this error:
gunzip: gaim-0.58.tar.gz: not in gzip format

when i type:

tar -xzvf tarball.tar.gz
I get this error:
gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors


I even upgraded gzip to version 1.3.3 and am getting the same problems.
What the heck am I doing wrong?

thanks in advance

I've had a problem similar to this. Run the following command:
This will tell you *exactly* what the file type is. You can then check for a utility that can handle it.

My problem was downloading files with my browser and them being only html content, but saved with the correct filename and extensions. Weird.

j.

Thanks jpweston. That was exactly the same problem I was having. If I downloaded via wget everything was fine. However, the version of mozilla (0.9.something) that comes on slack 8.0 had problems saving files. After I upgraded to 1.0 everything was fine.

wincen,

Yup, that's the distro/browser combo I was having issues with. I'm glad they fixed that with the newer version(s) of Moz.

j.

I might need to try that then. I'm downloading with Galeon and I'm gettting the same problems. Thanks guys.

Download with konqueror, it has built in ftp support and I've never had a corrupted download while using it.

try:
tar -jxvf <whatever>.tar.bz2