0

I have recently begun using a VPS and am learning linux along the way. I have compressed a folder using tar, then I gzipped it and used scp to send it to my server. When I decompress using tar -zxvf .tar.gz, all of the files within the folder still have .gz . Am I compressing the folder wrong to begin with?

mikeyrocks
  • 101
  • 1
  • This should probably have been asked on http://superuser.com or http://unix.stackexchange.com. – Caleb Apr 13 '11 at 12:39

3 Answers3

2

Try a "tar -tvzf" on your archive and check if the files inside the archive are individually gzipped from their file names. It's the only way I can think of that might make this happen, although I'm not sure how you would have gzipped each file while compressing.

Christi
  • 200
  • 1
  • 10
2

Is it possible that you first gzipped the files inside the folder, then used tar and then again gzipped the tar file? Something like this:

gzip folder/*
tar -cvf folder.tar folder
gzip folder.tar

If yes - the first gzip was too much. You should simply do:

tar -cvf folder.tar folder
gzip folder.tar

Or even simpler

tar -cvzf folder.tar.gz folder
bmk
  • 2,339
  • 2
  • 15
  • 10
  • Not sure how, but it looks like that is exactly what I did. Thanks for the quick response. – mikeyrocks Apr 13 '11 at 13:02
  • ...and the command to extract this file is `tar xvzf folder.tar.gz`. `v` = verbose (print the names of the files as they are extracted), `z` = gzip file and `f folder.tar.gz` specifies the file. See the [manual page on tar](http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?tar). – Lekensteyn Apr 13 '11 at 13:14
1

Yes, you are compressing the folder wrong to begin with. You can do it correctly all in one step like this:

tar cvfz tarfile.tar.gz folder/
Caleb
  • 11,813
  • 4
  • 36
  • 49