How to Extract or Unzip tar.gz Files in Linux

Once the file has been extracted, you will have access to all of the files and folders contained within the archive. On Windows, the easiest way to handle .tar files is to install the LGPL open source 7-Zip utility. Its name implies it’s a zip utility, but it also works with tar archives, and even provides commands for the cmd command-line interface. You’ll want to replace « tarfile » with the path to the tar.gz file that you’re trying to extract.

How to List Contents of .tar.gz File in Linux

The .tar portion of the file extension stands for tape archive, and is the reason that both of these file types are called tar files. Tar files date all the way back to 1979 when the tar command was created to allow system administrators to archive files onto tape. Forty years later we are still using the tar command to extract tar files on to our hard drives. Though both .zip and .tar.gz archive and compress files, they do so in different ways.

How to Unzip or Extract tar.gz Files on Windows

A file with just a .tar extension is uncompressed, but those will be very rare. The easiest way to open a tar.gz file on Windows is to install an excellent free utility called 7-Zip, which can handle tar.gz and just about any other file format. We’ve testimonials for max motors been recommending this app for years, and it’s one of the first things that we install whenever reinstalling Windows. 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.

Any remotely modern version of tar should auto-detect that the archive is gzipped, and add « z » for you. This is because most versions of tar allow both gnu and bsd style options (simplistically, gnu requires a hyphen, bsd doesn’t). As you can see, the results cryptocurrency trading binance strategies are less good in this case then using the somewhat standard GZIP algorithm. Still, the bzip2 and xz algorithms may show improvements with other data sets.

A tar.gz file is a compressed archive format commonly used in Linux systems to combine multiple files and directories into a single file while reducing their size. It combines the tar utility for archiving and the gzip utility for compression. Knowing how to extract or unzip a tar.gz file allows users to access and manipulate the archives’ contents efficiently. WinRAR is a popular file compression & archive utility software. It allows users to create, view, and extract files in various archive formats, including its native .RAR format as well as other common formats like .ZIP, .7z, ISO, .TAR, and more. In this article, you learned how to extract or unzip tar.gz files in Linux using the tar command and other tools.

Then we’ll jump into the step-by-step process of unzipping on both Linux and Windows platforms. The -C option is used to specify a different directory other than the current working directory. The tar format is just a format, and it’s an open format, so it can be created by more than just one tool. This places all of the files in the archive neatly into the « newfiles » directory. On Linux, BSD, Illumos, and even Mac OS, the tar command is already installed for you.

• Likewise, we don’t need the -j option to list the files in a tar.bz2 file.
• Short for “Tape ARchive,” the name “TAR” is a throwback to when files were stored on magnetic tape drives.
• Tar.gz has become the standard format used for distributing Linux and open source software since it’s easy to extract on basically any platform that isn’t Windows.
• These kinds of archives are sometimes called a tarbomb, although not always with a negative connotation.

Extract Files from a .tar.gz via GUI

As a result, one isn’t necessarily better than the other — it’s all a matter of application. Where most operating systems make it easy to extract and create .zip files, the same can’t really be said for .tar files — at least not in ways that are easy to notice. When you extract files from a .tar.gz archive, the checksum is automatically verified to detect & handle any potential data corruption. 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. To extract a tar.gz file using an archive manager, you need to open the file with the archive manager and then click on the Extract button.

Firstly, we have -h which though not required in this particular case, I highly recommend to always include in your tar commands. This option stands for dereference, which will dereference (or follow) symlinks, archiving and dumping the files they point to. It also integrates with the Windows Explorer context menu, which enables users to create and extract archives directly from the right-click menu.

.tar vs .tar.gz Files

Compressing and extracting these files, however, isn’t always intuitive. This article provides detailed guides to unzip .tar.gz files in Linux and Windows, as well as a few helpful tips and tricks. A user-friendly way to extract files from a .tar.gz archive is via a Graphical User Interface (GUI). A GUI is more suitable for beginners than a command-line tool. The result is that we 12 bytes less as a result of a better (but generally slower) compression attempt (at level -9) by GZIP.

That’s why you rarely see just a .tar file and more commonly encounter .tar.gz or .tgz files. As we see later, different compression utilities may require different methods for extracting and unzipping files. Though we 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. 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.

You can also select the files and directories you want to extract and the destination directory where you want to extract them. 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.

Alternatively, you can also specify a source and destination file path when using the tar utility. 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 bakkt ceo confirms there are no plans to support xrp want to extract. Technical details aside, all you need to remember is that .zip files are more accessible but less space-efficient, while .tar files are less accessible but more space-efficient.