mick crane wrote: > I thought you put the options after a hyphen with tar ?
Tar accepts 3 styles of options. The style with a single dash is called the 'UNIX' or 'short-option' style in the man page. > "tar -cfvz archive_file.tgz ./directory_to_archive" > doesn't work. The `-f` option requires an argument, the tar file, so with your command, tar would create an output file called 'vz'. The rest of the command line is considered a list of files and directories to include in the archive. Tar fails because the input file archive_file.tgz does not exist. Try `tar -cvzf archive_file.tgz ./directory_to_archive`. Thomas