I know I've posted this question on another thread but I tink I need a new thread to post this question so please delete my other post for me since I dont know how to do that...

well I had downloaded a .tgz package from internet on my dads computer which is running on XP. But when I burned the .tgz file onto a CD to be able to move it to my Slack laptop, the file somehow had renamed itself or converted into another file called .tar

I have no idea how this happend but I really need it to be a .tgz file....

extremely grateful for answers...

Use the "file" command to find out what your file actually is.
If it is infact a .tgz file, then simply rename it.

Check if its contents are not damaged. There should be doinst.sh and slack-desc in install folder. If they are, just rename tar.gz into tgz.

thanks allot for the answers!

I just used tar -xfj command on the package and then used gzip and then renamed it to xxxx.tgz

I just don't really understand why installpkg command can't be used on tar.gz packages when they are thesame thing as tgz packages..

well thanks again.

They aren't the same: tar.gz usually just contains the source code, which you must compile yourself - usually ./configure make make install etc
A slackware package .tgz is already compiled and when you do installpkg it just copies the pre-compiled binaries to the proper directories to run.

my understanding is this:
the contents of an archive are not determined by the file suffix!
*.z is a tar file - this is usually used to add more than one file into a single file (usually prior to compression)
*.gz is a compressed file using the gzip utility
*.tar.gz is one or more files tarred and gzipped
*.tgz is an abbreviation of the above, and is also the *special* case of slackware packages
a *.tgz is not necessarily a slackware package!

be careful when using windows to download or modify linux/unix files, as it will do strange things sometimes, but in your case a rename as stated previously should fix it.

there is also commonly found *.bz2

for *.tar.gz use tar -xvzf
for *.bz2 use tar -xjvf