Not successful in opening *.tar.gz files
 

I downloaded the source for Avida.

I tried to "tar -xvf [filename]", yet it gave me the error message saying:

1. This does not look like a tar archive.
2. Skipping to next header.
3. Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers.

This has happened before.

Try tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz

HTH

It's a g-zipped tar archive, so first you must gunzip it, and then untar it. Chefmark is correct.

To get this concept, consider:

gzip -d *.tar.gz | tar -xvf

This shows that the archive is un-gzipped first, and then extracted.

Merci beaucoup
 

Danke. :)