Fix tar gzip: stdin: not in gzip format Error – Linux Tutorial

When you are using linux tar command to extract a .tar.gz file, you may get gzip: stdin: not in gzip format error. In this tutorial, we will introduce you how to fix it.

For example:

We may compress a folder to create a .tar.gz file using tar. Here is the command:

tar -cf vp_audio.tar.gz vp_audio

In this code, we will compress vp_audio directory and create a vp_audio.tar.gz file.

Then we can download it to extract by following command:

tar -zxf vp_audio.tar.gz

However, we will get error: gzip: stdin: not in gzip format

How to fix this error?

It is very easy, we can use command below:

tar -xf vp_audio.tar.gz

We do not need to use z argument in tar command.