SwiftMailer: can't open .tar.gz archives on Linux

Question

I downloaded a couple of versions from http://swiftmailer.org/downloads/archive (tar.gz) but the archive manager says

tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

when I try to open it. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Try:

gzip -d file.tar.gz

then:

tar -xf file.tar

This was taken from:

http://fosshelp.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/solution-tar-this-does-not-look-like.html

Answer 2

Or just tar xzf file.tar.gz . Easier, faster, and takes less disk space.

Update:

I don't see why that doesn't work, but ungzipping first does. In that case, it would be better to:

gzip -dc file.tar.gz | tar xzf -

which at least uses a pipe to avoid uncompressing and reading back from mass storage.