tar archives of type tgz

dalraidia · 12-13-2002, 11:35 AM

I have downloaded a file, and the instructions on using the material say to "unpack it in the usual way using tar". The file has an extension of .tgz and when I do "tar -xf file.tgz" it fails with messages "tar: this does not look like a tar archive" etc. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks,
Newbie John

bulliver · 12-13-2002, 11:39 AM

The file needs to be gunzipped first. try this:
tar -zxf your-file.tgz
The "z" flag uncompresses gzipped files. You would do the same to unzip/tar your-file.tar.gz

Like wise with:
tar -jxf your-file.tar.bz2
you can uncompress bzip2'd files.

MasterC · 12-13-2002, 12:39 PM

To find out what any given file type is, and then determine your needs (for uncompressing in this situation) to work with the file, use the command 'file'. So:
file filename

And if 'filename' is a tar.gz file with the extensions removed, file will tell you exactly what it is, or appears to be.

Cool

pilot1 · 12-13-2002, 09:54 PM

A .tgz file is the same as a .tar.gz, the extension is just different.
You can unpack it by using tar -zxf filename, or if you want to see what it's doing use tar -zxvf filename.