The most common and widely supported method is to use the tar command, which can handle various compression formats, including gzip. While gzip compression is most frequently used to create .tar.gz or .tgz files, tar also supports bzip2 compression. This allows you to create bzip2-compressed files, often named .tar.bz2, .tar.bz, or .tbz files. To do so, just replace the -z for gzip in the commands here with a -j for bzip2. When you want to share multiple files with someone else, compressing those files into a single TAR archive is the most efficient solution. Apart from occupying less space on your system storage, compressed archives utilize less server bandwidth when downloaded by multiple users.
It can create a .tar archive and then compress it with gzip or bzip2 compression in a single command. When you extract files from a .tar.gz archive, the checksum is automatically verified to detect & handle any potential data corruption. A GZ file is nothing but a file compressed using the gzip algorithm. You can use the official GNU gzip utility to extract the content of the compressed archive file. If the file you’re looking at is a TAR.GZ, using either tar or 7-Zip to extract the file will be a much simpler choice.
You also need to use the -z option to tell tar that the archive is compressed with gzip, and the -f option to specify the file name. While every tar.gz file is a .tar archive, not every .gz is a .tar file. The .gz extension represents the gzip compression format, which can be applied to almost any file format to compress data and save space. This error usually occurs when a .tar has been saved as a .gz despite having never been compressed using the gzip utility. 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. Unlike Windows’ convenient graphical user interface (GUI) for unzipping .zip files, you need to use the tar utility through the command line.
Extract a tarball to another directory
If you have an existing tarball and want to add a new file into it, you don’t have to unarchive everything just to add a new file. Then we’ll jump into the step-by-step process of unzipping on both Linux and Windows platforms. Locate the compressed archive file and right-click on it to bring up the menu. Similarly, you can unzip specific directories from the archive as well. Creating archives is an important step when you’re backing up your Linux file system.
Exclude Directories and Files
If you want to unzip the files to a different folder, click on the Extract To option. Choose the appropriate location and click Select to extract the file to that location. The system will extract all the files to your current directory by default.
This ensures that your backup remains unaffected and the files don’t corrupt if anything breaks on your system. Once you’ve selected the right file, you’ll see “7-Zip File Manager” show up in the select app dialog. If you want 7-Zip to always handle tar.gz files in the future, you’re going to want to select the “Always” button at the bottom of the dialog. Similar to the previous error, this error occurs when an archive was saved as a .tar despite not being a .tar archive.
- 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.
- The next section shows how .tar comes with a few extra features that make it the better compression format for certain files and applications.
- Some of the most popular archive managers for Linux are File Roller, Ark, Xarchiver, and PeaZip.
You can also choose the destination directory where you want to extract the files. By default, tar extracts the archive contents in the current working directory. 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. Learn how to extract or unzip tar.gz files in Linux using the tar command and other tools.
As we cover more in the next section, you can verify file names by listing contents with the tar -tf filename.tar.gz command. Given this structure, the site admin could extract your incoming archive directly to the server’s root directory. The tar utility autodetects the existence of /var/ as well as the subdirectories store, deals, and images, and distributes the files into the proper directories. In the shell, you can add a file or directory to a tar archive as long as it is not compressed. If your archive has been compressed, you must uncompress it, but you do not need to unarchive it.
Is .gz a .tar file?
You can also use –wildcards to extract all files with a certain extension or name. Otherwise, keep reading to learn how to unzip .tar.gz files in Linux, macOS, and Windows. 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.
Alternatively, you can also specify a source and destination file path when using the tar utility. 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. You will learn how to list the contents of a tar archive without unpacking it and how to extract only a single file or a single directory.
And of course this is possible with the Linux tar command, but firstly you need to check what is there inside the tarball without unpacking it. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. The tar format is just a what happens once xrp hits $10 format, and it’s an open format, so it can be created by more than just one tool.
This compression is lossless – that means no data is lost during the compression process, and the original files can be fully restored upon extraction. Decompressing TAR and TAR.GZ files is only a matter of few clicks using the GUI. 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 been recommending this app for years, and it’s one of the first things that we install whenever reinstalling Windows.