First I will start with a thank you to the community. I read here quite a bit. I have read man pages and the how to's here and there and I am ready to ask a few specific questions regarding installing and upgrading packages.

tar -zxvf package-name.tar.gz
tar zxvf package-name.tar.gz

I notice this a lot when looking at web documentation reagarding installation. What does the hyphen do in this instance and why is it noted at times and not in others during a random install of a package?

I have a few packages that I rely on heavily. One is a mail server and others are web, file, and ftp servers.

The other day I was notified that a newer version of my mail server package was available. I downloaded and just for an experiment, I didn't uninstall the package that was present, I simply did a "tar xvf mail-server.tar.gz" and it began to ask me if I was upgrading and etc.

This was great!!! All my settings, users, and etc. where preserved. How easy can it get??!!? So I was curious and did the same with webmin and samba. It upgraded the packages just like it did with my mail server package.

My other question is that. Can you upgrade ALL lnux packages this was or did I just get luck with these three packages?

I have been using Linux for servers for a while now. I am obviously not a Linux expert. I am moving toward a tri boot with slack, debian, and WinXP for my desktop use. That is when the real learning will start IMO. Using just Linux day to day.