When I extract .tar.gz all of the files within the folders have the .gz suffix

Question

I have recently begun using a VPS and am learning linux along the way. I have compressed a folder using tar, then I gzipped it and used scp to send it to my server. When I decompress using tar -zxvf .tar.gz, all of the files within the folder still have .gz . Am I compressing the folder wrong to begin with?

Answer 1

Is it possible that you first gzipped the files inside the folder, then used tar and then again gzipped the tar file? Something like this:

gzip folder/*
tar -cvf folder.tar folder
gzip folder.tar

If yes - the first gzip was too much. You should simply do:

tar -cvf folder.tar folder
gzip folder.tar

Or even simpler

tar -cvzf folder.tar.gz folder

Answer 2

Yes, you are compressing the folder wrong to begin with. You can do it correctly all in one step like this:

tar cvfz tarfile.tar.gz folder/

Answer 3

Try a "tar -tvzf" on your archive and check if the files inside the archive are individually gzipped from their file names. It's the only way I can think of that might make this happen, although I'm not sure how you would have gzipped each file while compressing.