Hi Peter, > Lastly, I downloaded the file from the Opera browser, and hey, > presto!, file(1) reported > > mom-2.2-a (1).tar.gz: POSIX tar archive (GNU) > > If anyone knows why this is, I'll be glad of the knowledge.
My reply to Ulrich touched upon it. Your Apache is sending a Content-Encoding header and the browser is decompressing the result. The brief description at https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-3.1.2.2 suggests you should configure Apache to not do that for pre-compressed tar files. (If the URL foo.tar was retrieved and the server and client agreed to gzip it over the wire then the header should still be present and automatic decompression occur.) This is a common problem. I'd have expected foo.tar.gz to be Content-Type appliction/gzip, without a Content-Encoding. There's no official MIME type for tar file AIUI. This is along those lines, except it's still using the unofficial MIME type. curl -sSIL http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/nmh/nmh-1.7.tar.gz -- Cheers, Ralph. https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy
