A significant improvement is to instead use tar -c files | gzip > ../foo.tgz No messing around with flags, just a single one saying that you want to create an

A significant improvement is to instead use tar -c files | gzip > ../foo.tgz No messing around with flags, just a single one saying that you want to create an archive rather than extract one. No messing around with filename parameters—that's what the shell is there for.