question on tar.gz files

[Linuxenigma]

Hello everyone. Im back with a new question. I've been reading through the links that were suggested to me on learning Linux. Great stuff and a whole lot of fun. I have a question though on tar.gz files.

First question is can somebody give me a brief rundown on tar files. I think i've read a couple things that have made reference to tarball files and also tape archive.
Second question is on gz files. From what i've gathered those are zipped files.

For instance, i just downloaded adobe acrobat with the following name:
linux-ar-405.tar.gz

I was trying to figure out how to unzip this sucker and to install acrobat. Can anyone help me out here and tell me what im doing wrong? i cant seem to unzip the sucker...

Thanks everyone,

LE

[Choozo]

For some (to me) unfathomable reason, some browsers uncompress those files whilst downloading (using HTTP download ofcourse), but still keep the *.gz extention.
If this is the case, try tar xvf filename-1.2.0.tar.gz (usually one would do 'tar zxvf' on those *.gz files).

This should unpack the archive into a new directory 'filename-1.2.0' in the directory you are when untarring the file.

Then you just 'cd' into that directory and look for README or INSTALL textfiles. Have a look at those.

Cheers :)

[X_console]

For .tar.gz: tar xvzf file.tar.gz
For .tar.bz2: tar xvyf file.tar.bz2
For .bz2: bunzip file.bz2
For .tar: tar xvf file.tar
For .gz: gunzip file.gz
For .zip: unzip file.zip
For .Z: gunzip file.Z

[ 24 September 2001: Message edited by: X_console ]

[inkedmn]

check this (http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/compiling/softinstall.html) out.

[eXtremist]

I never quite understood the reasoning behind tarring AND zipping files.. Can anyone tell me?

I mean, if you want a single archive with multiple files inside, gzip does that.. Why tar it first (or after, whatever).

Maybe its just an outdated standard that keeps sticking around..

[X_console]

tar automatically zips it up for you and archives it as the same time with one command:

tar cvzf files.tar.gz file1 file2 file3 ...

You can also use bzip2 instead of gzip:

tar cvyf files.tar.bz2 file1 file2 file3 ...