From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; U) Opera 7.23  [en]

Description of problem:
When I run "file -z foo.tar.gz", the program hangs. I tried this 
command on a machine with a different version of Linux, but the same 
version of file (4.02), and it worked as expected, which is to say it 
reported that the file was a "tar archive (gzip compressed data...".

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
4.02-2

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. file -z foo.tar.gz

    

Actual Results:  The program hangs

Expected Results:  It should print out the type of the file

Additional info:

If I don't use -z, file correctly reports that the file is a gzip 
compressed file.

This bug was reported for file 3.39 (bug #72986) and was apparently 
fixed then.