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How do I open a ".tar.tgz" file?

  • How do I open a ".tar.tgz" file? That's all one long extension. I have a friend who's hosting package expired on www.canaca.com. So I immediately logged-in to backup his information. The problem is the backup function gives me a huge file with a .tar.tgz extension. Now I would like to take the contents of that file and upload to my own hosting service. I tried uncompressing with WinZip, WinRar, WinAce, ZipGenius, StuffIt, Gzip, GUnzip, and more! None of these programs recognize the file as a valid archive. I uploaded the file to my hosting service, and attempted to extract it from there. Same result. I also redownloaded the backup, thinking the original file may have been corrupted, but I got the exact same file down to the byte. They seem to have disconnected the ftp access, so I can no longer access the files that way. The backup function is my only option. So am I stuck with a proprietary file which can only be uncompressed on www.canaca.com or is there another way to crack this nut? Thanks!

  • Answer:

    I've got it! It had an extra byte at the start of the file - it looks like a space. Fix it with "dd if=intothegloom.com-20080328_192636.tar.gz of=intothegloom.com-20080328_192636.tar.gz.dd bs=1 skip=1" Note: this will be a very slow command, as dd is very non-optimal on bytes instead of blocks. It will be CPU-bound, not I/O-bound, so the hard drive light won't stay lit or anything. Huh. It looks like that would take about 100 minutes. How about: "tail --bytes=570705935 intothegloom.com-20080328_192636.tar.gz > intothegloom.com-20080328_192636.tar.gz.tail" - that takes under a minute. So, it's a .tar.gz file. gzip decompresses that okay, tar gets down to var/yp/, & there's some noise about trailing garbage which I doubt is important.

exolstice at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

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I agree with epersonae about 7-Zip. It works much the same on Windows. I don't think it recognizes .tgz but it does do .tar and .gz so, as other have said, rename .tgz to .tar.gz. Run it once to get a single .tar file and then again to get the individual files. If that doesn't work then something weird has happened. Perhaps the FTP issue cschneid mentioned. Unfortunately you're really out of luck if that happened.

tetranz

IT WORKED! Thanks for all the help. It was much appreciated.

exolstice

Bingo Pronoiac! I was trying to match magic ids of gz/bz2/tar etc. in the text and hit it just after the first space - 1F 8B 08. Magic id info courtesy http://filext.com/file-extension/gz Just removing the space does the trick.

swapspace

For anyone wondering, the file command just calls the file "data." A quick attempt compression with lzop suggests that it's probably compressed already. I can add lzop, unrar, & shar to the list of things it's not. I'm going to toss unix2dos & dos2unix to see if an ascii/binary translation botched this up.

Pronoiac

hardcore: that would work for a tgz or tar.gz file, but not this.

Pronoiac

gzip -dc filename | tar xvf -

hardcode

I download the file using the backup function from the hosting service www.canaca.com (via http web based application). I guess they use their own proprietary file format. Thanks for all the help!

exolstice

epersonae is right, 7-zip can natively open up tar files. It's also great at opening just about any other archive file in the world too.

Geppp

I took a look at your file and tried processing it with tar, unzip, gunzip, bunzip2, and 7zip. The file does not appear to be a valid archive of any of these types. The file seems to contain mostly binary data, but the word "dummy" appears, ascii-encoded, in the first line of the file, as shown by the command: % head -1 filename.tar.tgz | strings dummy hP$%1 N^LjY R^jPaL/} B{,! wwI~ fgI8M Q9v- Also, the last line of the file seems to contain a fairly long hexadecimal string: % tail -1 filename.tar.tgz | strings >4a8ac224910a7a2b5c37a67eb0865cf6 I'm not entirely sure what to make of that; I don't know of an archive format that has the text "dummy" at its beginning, nor am I familiar with that hex checksum(?) at the end...

Juffo-Wup

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