installing .tar.tar
 

i tried to install xmss-1.2.11 in fedora 10.
downloaded the file .tar.tar type
used gzip
and then used tar -xvzf
it said "this does not look like a valid tape archive" ...
what do i do ???

Welcome to LQ!!!

First, did you check with the package manager to see if xmss is available there? (It is not on my system (Arch))

A file ending in ".tar.tar" makes no sense--are you sure it is not .tar.gz?

If you have a file ending in .tar.gz, you can extract it with one command: tar -xzvf filename (Note that the order of flags matters in some cases)

For .tar.bz2, use tar -xjvf

"man tar" for more details

A file ends up with an "archive.tar.tar" name when it is not created properly. [Erroneous information deleted by poster] Rename the file to "archive.tar" and try again. If it still does not work you may need to download another archive such as "archive.tar.bz" or "archive.tar.bz2" and try again.

An archive with the name "archive.tar" is not a compressed archive and there is no need to use a "-z" option.

When you get *.tar.tar file it normally means that browser saved file with wrong extension and it is really *.tar.gz or *.tar.bz2

Not on my system......

eg: "tar -cvf archive folder"

creates the file "archive". This will extract using "tar -xvf archive" and will re-create "folder"

Keep in mind that extensions are not used in Linux to do anything except help the user. eg--in my example--"archive" and "archive.tar" (assuming the same content) will do exactly the same thing with the tar command.

Thanks for the correction. I have removed the incorrect content from my post to avoid dissemination of misleading and wrong information. I recently unzipped a number of archives with unzip and they always presume the archive will have a ".zip" extension. I guess I was not thinking.