It's not working because you are not in the right directory. You need to cd into the directory you saved it in... [mhussain@mhussain Download]$ pwd /home/mhussain/Download [mhussain@mhussain Download]$ ls -ld wifizoo* -rw-rw-r--. 1 mhussain mhussain 913343 2009-09-07 11:00 wifizoo.tar [mhussain@mhussain Download]$ tar xf wifizoo.tar [mhussain@mhussain Download]$ ls -ld wifizoo* -rw-rw-r--. 1 mhussain mhussain 913343 2009-09-07 11:00 wifizoo.tar drwxrwxr-x. 4 mhussain mhussain 4096 2009-09-07 11:00 wifizoo_v1.3 And it works no problem, if you are not in the right directory it won't work