Haha, damn I was close...if only I looked at the man page a little closer.

And ye, I asked my supervisor why he wanted to compress then decompress right away and he admitted that it is silly and useless right now but he said we'd be expanding on it later and doing stuff with it...not sure what but we'll see...haha.

and I am most definitely fooling around with junk directories and folders i've created to mess around and test things.

---------- Post updated at 02:43 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:40 PM ----------

k so I'm getting a few errors...
when I type:
tar cvf - usr/local/ | gzip -c - | gunzip -c - | tar xvfC - /opt/

I get:
usr/local/
usr/local/bin/
usr/local/bin/hello/
usr/local/
tar: usr/local: Cannot mkdir: No such file or directory
usr/local/bin/
tar: usr/local/bin: Cannot mkdir: No such file or directory
usr/local/bin/hello/
tar: usr/local/bin/hello: Cannot mkdir: No such file or directory
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors


I'm sure I've just got the wrong syntax or something but I keep messing around with it and I keep getting errors.

Thanks