I had the same error " member name contains `..' " when extracting an archive (and running it through gzip). # tar -zxvf my_tar_file.tar.gz The problem - I think - is that I created a tarball while being in some subdirectory. To cut the leading `\' from filenames I used the -P option. So the new cmd is: tar -zxvfP my_tar_file.tar.gz