Well, I'm new to Linux, and I need some help understanding how to decompress files. for example if i have a file called *.tar.gz, what do i do.....i'm so used to winzip, i'm totally lost.

tar -xvzf file.tar.gz

I didn't know the "z" switch within tar existed, so therefore tend to work on the general principle below... Starting at the right, look at the extension... .gz means that the file is a gzip file so the first thing we need to do is uncompress it... gunzip file.tar.gz Now if we look at the file we have file.tar ... tar is basically a way of creating a single file containing a heirarchical data structure. It is not a compression method. Therefore to restore the files, you need to untar it. tar xvf file.tar Other UNIX compressed files may have the extension .Z ... to uncompress simply type "uncompress file.Z" Sean