[olug] help with copyig using tar

[Ryan Stille]

I'm trying to copy a directory structure to another location using tar.  I thought this would work:

tar -czf - source_dir_name |tar -xzf - -C /tmp/dest_dir_name/

It kind of works, the source_dir_name directory now exists under /tmp/dest_dir_name/, but I also get this output on my terminal: 
gzip: stdin: decompression OK, trailing garbage ignored
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

So I don't know if everything worked ok.  Any ideas?

Thanks,
-Ryan