I've been all over Google tonight trying to figure this out. Even tried to download some untar program from sourceforge but it too was a tar.gz :)

Do I have to deal with telnet to do it?

No way is it this complicated. I thought one of you forum members might point out the obvious keyword phrase I'm not typing or if you know the simple answer..

How do you unpack a compressed tar file?

XP or Apache server

Thanks :)

Thanks so much Philipp!

Never had a problem with compressed files before. I'll download one of those and try it :)

Holy cow winzip worked great! I guess I didn't have it on this computer..

Once again I can't thank you enough Philipp... Frustrating to be so stuck like that.

Wish an answer like that was in the SERPS

:)

(For the record, I suggested WinZIP or WinRAR but then saw the Apache line and figured it was a scripting question, not a software question, and killed my answer!)

tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz

will do it. (in Linux/Unix , maybe OS X too)

That is what I didn't understand Justin – where do you type that...

I tried going "Start--> Run" in Windows to type it but no joy...
Then I tried FTP'd the file to my site and tried telnet but couldn't remember/figure out how to log in using telnet client

That's why I mentioned Apache in the above post thinking that it's a Linux based server but to be honest I'm in way over my head on this old school stuff. TAR stands for Tape ARchive – I've been around a long time but not long enough I guess.

I got stuck because I assumed that my computer had Winzip – when Windows didn't recognize a tar I went searching Google and got deeper and deeper in over my head. (I had forgotten that the computer I was on had a recent hard drive / os replacement)

All there is in Google is a bunch of pages with instructions just like yours Justin – but none mention where to type "tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz" or that you simply need some software :)