Must be something on your system. I just downloaded the file and untarred it myself: csharp-mbp15:Downloads csharp$ tar zxvf HadoopConnect-1.1-151409.tgz HadoopConnect/ HadoopConnect/README/ HadoopConnect/README/export.conf.spec HadoopConnect/README/clusters.conf.spec HadoopConnect/README/inputs.conf.spec ... That's the correct place to grab it, but somehow you're ending up with a corrupt copy. Proxy or firewall doing something to the bits perhaps? Are you sure your web browser isn't automatically un-gziping it? What happens if you just tar xvf and see if maybe its getting uncompressed automatically? ... View more