How to Extract and Unzip tar.gz files Pressidium Knowledge Base

It may sound like a silly mistake, but it’s surprisingly common in situations where users directly rename files and their extensions (such as .tar and .gz) in the process. As a result, one isn’t necessarily better than the other — it’s all a matter of application. To untar tar.gz files just means to extract the contents of the tar file (also known as a tarball). Some of the most popular archive managers for Linux are File Roller, Ark, Xarchiver, and PeaZip. They offer more features and options than the file managers, such as creating, modifying, encrypting, and splitting archives. You can install them from your distribution’s package manager or software center.

Someone somewhere is probably still using tar with tape. A .tar.gz or .tgz file is a compressed archive file format that is a combination of two other archive formats, namely TAR (tape archive) and GZIP. The TAR format is used to store multiple files into one archive, while GZIP is used to compress the data in the archive to reduce its size.

There are many such tools available, with a friendly graphical user interface, including 7-Zip (open source) and WinRAR (free trial). Windows 10 also includes a build in tar utility that can be used via the command line / terminal. You can also extract only specific files or directories from a tar.gz archive, by providing their names after the archive name. You need to use the exact names and paths as listed by the tar -t command.

Is .tar.gz same as .zip?

Where commands have little (if any) room for typos or omissions, many common errors are the result of small mistakes, misspellings, or incorrect formats. Thankfully, unless you’re somehow missing your tar or gzip utility, most common errors are very easy to fix. With the command prompt open, use the appropriate commands to change the current working directory (cd) to the location of the .tar.gz file you want to unzip. Alternatively, you can also specify a source and destination file path when using the tar utility.

How to Extract or Unzip a tar.gz File in Linux using GUI Tools

• In x mode, change directories after opening the archive but before extracting entries from the archive.
• If the directory does not exist, tar will create it automatically.
• Knowing how to unzip a .tar.gz file allows users to extract and access the archives’ contents efficiently.
• Most file managers, such as Nautilus, Dolphin, or Thunar, support extracting tar.gz files by right-clicking on the file and choosing the Extract option from the context menu.
• You also need to use the -z option to indicate that the archive is compressed with gzip, and the -f option to specify the file name.

So we can list the content of the archive without actually extracting everything by using -tz argument where -t is for –list i.e. list the contents of the archive. In fact, tar and gzip packages come pre-installed on many operating systems. Some operating systems give packages like „sudo”, „gnome” as dependent packages. People new to the .tar format usually equate it to a .zip archive, but a tar archive is not compressed. Tar collected all the files into one package, but the files can be compressed with separate utilities.

What does it mean to untar tar.gz files?

To do this we’ll use almost exactly the same command as before but with one important difference. The .bz2 extension suffix tells us it has been compressed using the bzip2 command. Instead of using the-z (gzip) option, we will use the -j (bzip2) option to unzip the bz2 file. Unlike Windows’ convenient graphical user interface (GUI) for unzipping .zip files, you need to use the tar utility through the command line.

Choosing Where to Extract the Files To

If you want to extract the files to a different directory, you can use the -C option, which tells tar to change the directory before extracting the files. You need to specify the path to the directory where you want to extract the files after the -C option. To extract a tar.gz file using what is a bitcoin wallet the tar command, you need to use the -x option, which tells tar to extract the files from the archive.

Note that this command will throw an error unless you specify the exact filename listed in the .tar file. As we cover more in the next section, you can verify file names by listing contents with the tar -tf filename.tar.gz command. Of course, that’s not to say .tar files are some kind of “lesser” format than .zip. Rather, they both accomplish the same task (file compression) in the same way. The .tar section of the file extension stands for “tape archive”.

However, there are also many third-party tools you can install for a more user-friendly experience. It’s often useful to list the contents of a .tar.gz how to sell coinbase pro coinbase what is holding vault file without having to unzip the entire archive. This command extracts (-x) the file (-f) specified (in this case, filename.tar.gz) to the current directory. Note that this command also works with other common compression formats such as .tar.bz2. Though gzip is the most common compression utility, it’s not the only one.

There are several ways to extract or unzip a tar.gz file in Linux, depending on the tool you have available or prefer to use. The most common and widely supported method is to use the tar command, which can handle various compression formats, including gzip. Just like the more familiar .zip files, .tar files compress large files into a single package, making it easier to store and send them through email, servers, and so on. As a result, it has become a common file extension for many open-source software packages and other resources.

Ubuntu is a Southern African philosophy and term download bitcoin wallet generator ledger bitcoin fork originating from South Africa and Zimbabwe. Once you choose the directory, click the Select button in the top right corner.

Sometimes you need to view the content of a tar file as it collects many files and ensures if a specific file is present. You can open most .tar.gz files using the tar command built in to Linux, macOS, and Windows 10. If you’re not comfortable with the terminal or command line, third-party tools such as 7-Zip offer a more user-friendly alternative. This error occurs if you try to decompress a file without specifying a decompression utility, specifically -z for gzip. The command extracts files to a new directory called example1, which is located in the current directory. A user-friendly way to extract files from a .tar.gz archive is via a Graphical User Interface (GUI).