On 10/8/20 5:41 AM, Alan Lehotsky wrote:

I’m a little tardy in upgrading (last installed 2018g), but this 2020b release has tar files without a root directory, so when I carelessly did a

tar -xzf tzcode2020b.tar.gz tar -xzf tzdata2020b.tar.gz

they overwrite each others files instead of unloading into respective directories ./tzcode2020b and ./tzdata2020b. Maybe this isn’t a change in behavior and I just forgot that it happened to me back in 2018.

It's not a change in behavior. Those tarballs have worked that way for decades. Some files are duplicates so they overwrite each other (this is so that each tarball is self-contained in some sense), but those files are exact duplicates. For a more modern style in which the tarball contains a single directory under which everything else lies, use <https://data.iana.org/time-zones/releases/tzdb-2020b.tar.lz>.