USB booting :: tar problems because of usb?

I'm running DSL from a pen drive.

I tried to install a few programs and ran into this error when trying to untar
[/home/dsl]# tar -xvfz peercast-linux.tgz
tar: z: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

I redownloaded peercast-linux.tgz to make sure the file isnt bad. I also had this same problem with a different program I tried to unpack.

I dont know what z: is or why tar would look for it... is it some default drive or directory that would normally be present if I was running the OS from a hard drive? Is there a way I can change z: to /cdrom so it uses my pen drive?

The order of arguments is mixed up. The "f" should be directly before the filename ("f" means "file"). As a result, tar thinks you are trying to open a file named "z". The "z" option passes the archive through the gzip (or gunzip?) program because it is a compressed archive.

tar -xzvf peercast-linux.tgz

man, i was completely off on that one

thanks alot!

original here.