Extract a gzip compressed tar archive in Linux | Linux | Tech-Recipes

Extract a gzip compressed tar archive in Linux

Contributed by qmchenry

October 3, 2003

Tagged: Linux

The version of tar in most Linux distributions supports gzip compression. This means that a gzipped tar file can be extracted in one simple command.

To extract the archive filename.tar.gz into the current directory:

tar xzf filename.tar.gz

If this fails, the version of tar may not support gzip compression. In this case, you can use the traditional two-stage command:

gzip -dc filename.tar.gz | tar xf -

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bofh468 5 years ago 1 point
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Another useful switch is -j for handling bzip2 compression. To do the same as above for a bzip-compressed tarball:

tar xjf filename.tar.bz2

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barretj 3 years ago 1 point
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another usefull tar command is this:

tar czvf tarball.tar.gz /tmp/tarball

this will tar and gzip the directory /tmp/tarball into the file tarball.tar.gz

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