tar hangs when trying to open a file in shell window

I'm tring to open a file called unz551x-glibc.tar.gz. So I open up my shell and type:

tar -xz unz551x-glibc.tar.gz

and I press enter and it does a carriage return and then hangs. No HD activity or anything. I just press ctrl+c to exit. How can I get tar to open this file?

i always use:

Code:

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tar -xvfz tarfile.tar.gz

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i don't know, but for some reason, the extra v and f always work for me. try that
-lakerdonald

Ok so what I did now was us gzip -d to decompress the file and now I'm left with myTarFile.tar

Then I typed in
tar -x myTarFile.tar
and press enter, adn it still hangs.

I too always use the -xvzf flag. Does it still hang when you try that? (In your case, do -xvf since you already gunzipped it).

As far as i know, you MUST use the -f flag.

As others said, most people use -xvf

the v just lists all the files as it is extracting them