Some help, for a stupid person...

[maruchan]

i have looked through how to's but i cant find how to really unpack tar gz files, and where they go... O.k so i dont know if did it right i went to console and and did the tar xvz bbbbbbbb.tar.gz But where those it go after that...? Did i did it right...?

[Strike]

Hopefully you did something like tar xvfz blahblah.tar.gz. After that it should spit out some junk, telling you where the files are going (that's what the v in that xvfz string stands for, x means extract, z means to gunzip them, and f means filename). Most likely it's in a directory with the same name as the tar file itself (like in my example, blahblah).

[demian]

Did the tar command you tried work??? I'd be surprised if it did. you missed an f. Anyway,

Tar Archives (*.tar):
unpack them with tar xvf filename.tar Humanly readable this means: extract (x) the archive from file (f) filename.tar Do so verbosely (v)
Gzip'ed tar archives (*.tar.gz, *.tgz)
unpack them with tar zxvf filename.tar Humanly readable: extract (x) the comprezed (z) http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif archive from file (f) filename.tgz Do so verbosely (v)
Bzip2 tar archives (*.tar.bz2)
unpack them with tar yxvf filename.tar Humanly readable: extract (x) the bzyp2compressed (y) http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif archive from file (f) filename.tgz Do so verbosely (v)
(This only works if your tar version is patched but most of them are right out of the box)

To determine where the contents goes you can first check the archives content by specifying the t flag: tar ztf filename.tgz shows you the contents without actually extracting stuff. By default the archives content goes to the directory ./ i.e. the dir you are in when calling the command. This can be changed with the -C option (as in Cange dir) like this:
tar yxfv filename.tar.bz2 -C /some/other/dir
Now the content of filename.tar.bz2 will go to /some/other/dir/

AND NOW THE BEST FOR LAST:
All this info and even more is available to you too!!
tar --help
man tar

are the most important tar commands http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif