Ubuntu – can’t decompress .tgz using gunzip

gziplinuxtarUbuntu

I was able to archive and compress a folder with the following command:

tar -cvfz example2.tgz example1

I then removed the example1 folder and tried to unpack the archive using this command:

tar -xvfz example2.tgz

and tried

tar -zxvf example2.tgz

Niether of these commands worked. The error returned was:

gzip: example2.tgz: not in gzip format
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

It clearly used gzip compression since I passed tar the z qualifier in the initial command. What am I doing wrong? I am on Ubuntu 14.0.4

Best Answer

The command you're showing in your first line (tar -cvfz example2.tgz example1) doesn't work and it should not output any file example2.tgz. Didn't you get an error? Perhaps the file example2.tgz existed already? Check if you have a file called z in that folder - that's where the tgz has been saved to, because:

The -f parameter specifies the file which must follow immediately afterwards: -f <file>

Try 

tar cvzf exam.tgz example1
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