<p>I need to unzip a compressed file on the fly in my program.  It works when I try it on my own linux computer, but for some reason the school computers fail whenever I tell them to do it.  To unzip I'm using the following command:</p>
<pre><code> zcat /file/address/file.tar.gz
</code></pre>
<p>and get the error:</p>
<pre><code> /file/address/file.tar.gz.Z: No such file or directory
</code></pre>
<p>I tried looking through the documentation but couldn't find a flag to turn off this odd behavior.</p>

Your school's system still has the old "compress" style utilities rather than the newer GNU "gzip" based ones.
You need to use
```
gzcat
```
rather than
```
zcat
```
, assuming that it's available.