[vox-tech] Problem with extracting in terminal

[Nick Schmalenberger]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 09:57:00AM -0700, Anahita Yazdi wrote:
> I have downloaded a package that I need to extract it on my desktop. I used
> terminal command tar zxvf filename.tar.gz to do so, however this is the
> error I keep getting:
> gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
> tar: Child returned status 1
> tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
> Would someone be able to help me with this please,
> Thanks so much,
> Anahita
If you run file filename.tar.gz it should tell you what kind of
file it really is, then you can properly extract it. File is
really an amazingly cool utility, its one of my favorite parts of
unix. It has so many cool file signatures, like for different
self extracting archives and stuff where it tells what kind of
executable it is and the archive format the executable is a
wrapper for.
Nick Schmalenberger