I received many responses to my question concerning the .tgz extension
on a file name. The 'official' answer is that the file is indeed a tarred
file which has been gzipped.
The reason for this was explained as follows:
"It was done mostly for linux people so they could get the distributions
home on dos floppies. That way the filenames could be 8.3."
"Should be. DOS-challenged people use .tgz as the extension for
tarred-gzipped stuff."
Several of the GNU utilities may be used to uncompress this file. For
example, gunzip recognizes the special extensions .tgz and .taz as shorthands
for .tar.gz and .tar.Z respectively. Several of the dozens of example
commands are included:
gunzip < xx.tgz | tar xBf -
gzcat foo.tar.gz | tar -tvf -
gnutar -ztvf thing.tgz
gunzip -c filename.tgz | tar xf -
gunzip < file.tar.z | tar tvf -
gzip --decompress --stdout < file.tgz | tar xvf -
cat file.tgz|gzip -d|tar -tvf -
Thank you all again very much for you quick an accurate assistance.
Thomas \:)