The tar ball only contains two files, the ARAGORN source (aragorn1.2.38.c or similar) and a man page (aragorn.1). Uncompress with: tar -xvzf aragorn1.2.38.tgz Compiling example: gcc -O3 -ffast-math -finline-functions -o aragorn aragorn1.2.38.c Put the aragorn man page in a directory read by the man command. These directories may be listed by: echo $MANPATH