Absolute Newbie Half Conquered Putty

[nbm]

Ok, so. Get ready to laugh at my malapropisms, I am sure this question will be littered with them. I apologize in advance.

I am upgrading my Joomla via patching with SSH. I have used the How to Update your Joomla tutorial and it has carried me successfully to the last step. Argh.

I am stuck (I think) because for some reason I have the wrong command to unzip the package file. It copied over and saved to the server fine. BUT for some reason when I type in the last two commands described in the tutorial Putty does not recognize the directory and then has trouble with the suffix.... Here are my commands....

gzip -d Joomla_1.5.3_to_1.5.7-Stable-Patch_Package.tar.gz
The tar.gz file now has a .tar extension so type:
tar -xvf Joomla_1.5.3_to_1.5.7-Stable-Patch_Package.tar

and I get a no such file or directory.

Oh wise Forum!! I would so appreciate anyone's help. I know sometimes its a trial dealing with a newbie, but I can promise good karma might abound. (?)

[hazel]

gzip -d Joomla_1.5.3_to_1.5.7-Stable-Patch_Package.tar.gz
The tar.gz file now has a .tar extension so type:
tar -xvf Joomla_1.5.3_to_1.5.7-Stable-Patch_Package.tar

and I get a no such file or directory.

Did you actually check that your unzip operation had worked by listing the directory afterwards with ls?

You don't say where you were doing this work, but if you were in one of the system directories (i.e. not in your home directory or one of its subs) you would not be allowed to create that .tar file unless you were working as root. As an ordinary user, you don't have write access to system directories so you can't create files in them.