OK, im a newbie, theres litterly millions of us right? Last night im reading oreilly's running linux and im at the chapter about zipping and unzipping with gzip etc.

wanting to put my learning to the test I attempted to
$gunzip -c kismet-2004-04-R1.tar.gz and I got a very interresting responce. mostly a lot of ???????????????????? in various strings then in the middle there was this snippet of read me and010064000175000001440000000017507530721172014476 Oustar dragonuser Junk, new , traffic-stollen from enlightenment shiny metal theme Alert-stolen from windows version of the game 'Wetrix' kismet-2004-04-R1/wav/junk_traffic.wav 0100644000175000001440000003475007517017107017011 oustar dragornuserRIFF?9WAVE fmt

then there was more garble, lots of ??????????????? in various strings, symbols intersperced with ????? that look like bullets taking up 2 lines high, then I could see parts of my login followed by 3 pages of 41er but the 41 was made from combinations of | and encompased several lines.

ok at this point I would imagine I got even the gurus guessing, no?
I may be a newbie and a hobbiest but Im serious about this and if you take the time to reply I would be greatly appreciative.

when im not hacking on linux im teaching myself c and reading other oreilly books.

Well, you see, when you said "gunzip -c kis..." you said it all.

I don't know the O'Reilly books, but there might be a difference between what's written there and what's in your Linux box. The "-c" option tells gunzip to dump the whole data from decompression to stdout. (a.k.a your console). So, what you saw was a perfectly normal .tar archive (something like an archive compressed with the "store" option).

If you had called it without any options, gunzip would've unzipped your tar.gz to a .tar file then it would've removed the original gzip.

You can still play around with the "-c" option...

$gunzip -c kismet-2004-04-R1.tar.gz > kismet-2004-04-R1.tar

...would produce your .tar file w/o deleting the original archive.

I don't see an actual question in your post, so I'm just assuming you are wondering what happened.

It sounds like it did exactly what you commanded it to do. "gunzip -c" unzips the file you give it and sends the result to standard output, which is usually your screen. It's the same as using "zcat".

If you have a tar.gz file, you can either "tar -xzf file" to uncompress it, or "gunzip -c file | tar -xf -". tar might not have always had the ability to read a compressed file.

Thank you, to the gracious people who took the time to give me a clue. OK now I know I had better put everything else aside and just learn the shells and there arguments.:O)