While the tar utility is enough for most purposes, you’ll need the gzip utility to create .tar.gz files. The following tar examples cover how to untar both popular formats and extract the contents of the compressed archive to a different directory. But to be able to know the filename, we must check the content of the archive. 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. Extract all content with tar command, extract a specific file and list the files without extracting them. To use gunzip, the gzip package is installed.
Let’s do the steps we mentioned above with gunzip. Here I have a wrapper archive which internally contains 2 nested gzip archives. Choose the directory to extract your files to. The output shows a newly created archive example1.tar.gz. Ubuntu versions are usually named using an alliterative adjective and an animal name, both starting with the same letter. Ubuntu is a Southern African philosophy and term originating from South Africa and Zimbabwe.
How to Extract or Unzip .tar.gz Files in Linux
You can also use –wildcards to extract all files with a certain extension or name. Now that we know the content of our archive, we can extract myssh file from this archive without extracting other contents. The command extracts files to a new directory called example1, which is located in the current directory. Ubuntu Core is a minimalistic and immutable version explicitly designed for the Internet of Things (IoT) and embedded systems. The name “Tar” stands for “Tape Archiver” because it was used to place data on storage tapes when tar was invented. A .tar.gz file is nothing but an archive.
You can just as easily unzip the resulting .tar.gz file with the decompress (-d) option. But with .zip being the easier of the two to use, why use .tar in the first place? As we’ll see in the next section, .tar comes with a few extra features that make it the better compression format for certain files and applications. Many of the downloadable Linux/Unix files found on the internet are compressed using a tar.gz format. Therefore, knowing how to open or untar tar.gz files is very useful.
Linux Command Cheat Sheet
We have 2 ways to open tar.gz files (tar, gunzip). Let’s make it more understandable with examples. After reading this article, you know how to extract or unzip .tar.gz file in Linux using different methods and tools.
Sometimes you need to view the content of a tar file as it collects many files and ensures if a specific file is present. It’s easy to get confused when navigating between .tar, .tar.gz, and .gz – not to mention zipping and unzipping them. Here are a few frequently asked questions we commonly hear from users working with .tar.gz files. This error occurs if you try to decompress a file without specifying a decompression utility, specifically -z for gzip. This error occurs when trying to extract specific files or directories from a .tar.gz file using tar.
The -list (-t) option will output a list of filenames. The tar command also provides support for extracting only specific files or directories from a .tar.gz file. Simply add a space-separated list of the files you want to extract. Though gzip is the most common compression utility, it’s not the only one.
- As we’ll cover more in the next section, you can verify file names by listing contents with the tar -tf filename.tar.gz command.
- The name “Tar” stands for “Tape Archiver” because it was used to place data on storage tapes when tar was invented.
- Sometimes you need to view the content of a tar file as it collects many files and ensures if a specific file is present.
Knowing how to unzip a .tar.gz file allows users to extract and access the archives’ contents efficiently. 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. With the command prompt open, https://www.bitcoin-mining.biz/ 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. Note that this command will throw an error unless you specify the exact filename listed in the .tar file.
Untar Unzip or Extract Tar Files in Unix or Linux
As you might imagine, using a different compression utility on a .tar file will result in a different double extension. Some common examples include .tar.bz2 (bzip2), .tar.br (Brotli), and .tar.zst (zstd), among many others. If that’s not entirely clear, don’t worry.
Though we’ll mostly focus on .tar.gz files, check out the end of the article for some quick tips on extracting .tar files in other formats. Where .zip files consist of many individually compressed files, .tar files are compressed as a single package, leaving its files uncompressed. In other words, .zip files are a collection of compressed files, while .tar files are a compressed collection of files. A few simple commands are all it takes to untar, unzip or extract tar gz files. You can create your own compressed .tar files using compression utilities such as gzip. Gzip is one of the most popular and available options, especially since it comes built in to most Linux distributions and macOS.
Example-3: List files inside gz archive without extraction
The tar program takes one or more files and “wraps” them into a self-contained file. Similar to the previous error, this error occurs when an archive was saved as a .tar despite not being a .tar archive. You can also add the verbose output option (-v) to provide detailed listings, including dates, securities/permissions, and more. Otherwise, keep reading to learn how to unzip .tar.gz files in Linux, macOS, and Windows. Here you can see that we are extracting the content of our archive into /tmp/temp.Jsuv directory instead of the current path.
If the command line isn’t your thing, there are plenty of user-friendly tools available to unzip tar.gz files. Like the tar utility, gzip also allows you to zip and unzip multiple files or entire directories at a time. Thankfully, you don’t need to be a 1960s computer technician to use and extract .tar files – nor do modern .tar files even have anything to do with old computers. You can open most .tar.gz files using the tar command built in to Linux, macOS, and Windows 10.
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A “.tar” file is a collection of files compressed into a single file or archive. Short for “Tape ARchive,” the name “TAR” is a throwback https://www.topbitcoinnews.org/ to when files were stored on magnetic tape drives. We learned how to install packages according to Linux distributions.
The -C option is used to specify a different directory other than the current working directory. As you can see, both our gz archives are extracted. To extract multiple gz archives we can place them inside a directory and then use -r or –recursive to perform the extraction recursively.
If you’re not comfortable with the terminal or command line, third-party tools such as 7-Zip offer a more user-friendly alternative. In this example, the user tried to extract the file titled https://www.coinbreakingnews.info/ “FILE” from filename.tar.gz. However, tar was unable to find FILE within .tar.gz, meaning that the user either misspelled the name or that the file simply doesn’t exist in filename.tar.gz.
