Decompress and extract a tgz or tar.gz archive in a single step

Posted by Quinn McHenry in UNIX

Compressed UNIX tar archives (typically tar.gz or .tgz extensions) can be extracted in a single command. This is faster and works with less disk space available.

To extract the compressed tar archive target.tar.gz into the current working directory with:

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

If the file was compressed with bzip2 (i.e., .tar.bz2), you can substitute the bzip2 command for gzip.

If the archive was compressed with the UNIX compress command (archive ending in .Z) you can use:

zcat target.tar.Z | tar xf -

About Quinn McHenry

Quinn was one of the original co-founders of Tech-Recipes. He is currently crafting iOS applications as a senior developer at Small Planet Digital in Brooklyn, New York.
View more articles by Quinn McHenry

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10 Responses to “Decompress and extract a tgz or tar.gz archive in a single step”

October 03, 2008 at 12:38 am, Jeff said:

this is easier:

# tar xvzf target.tar.gz

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- November 28, 2010 at 10:15 am, perk said:
  
  exactelly true ur the best……
  
  Reply
October 03, 2008 at 12:48 am, Quinn McHenry said:

Oh, yeah, I’ll admit that command is easier, although back in 2003 it only seemed to work in some linux distros. I was using Solaris (probably 7 at the time) and that tar didn’t have that cool option. I don’t have a Solaris box handy now, but I would be surprised if that hadn’t crept its way in yet.

Should be noted that ‘j’ in place of ‘z’ in your command will extract a bz2 archived tar file. J. Really. I guess all the appropriate letters were on vacation.

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- March 02, 2011 at 10:10 am, Karen said:
  
  Your original method was correct. The tar commands on AIX, HP-UX and Solaris do not accept the options z or j.
  
  For those lazy GNU people, you can actually omit the letter too, as GNU tar will work out what compression algorithm was used. But the original post done this is the most portable and professonal way
  
  Reply
  - May 15, 2011 at 4:39 am, Anonymous said:
    
    Thanks for adding that updated information.
    
    Reply
April 29, 2010 at 7:21 am, Anonymous said:

i got following error when i am trying to run the above command.

/ITS/release/hawai > gzip -dc sx51_wp4_hp_itanium_dev.tar.gz | tar xf -
tar: ./bin/cob32 – cannot create
tar: ./bin/cob64 – cannot create
tar: ./bin/cobffnd32 – cannot create
tar: ./bin/cobffnd64 – cannot create
tar: ./bin/cobffnd32_t – cannot create
tar: ./bin/cobffnd64_t – cannot create
directory checksum error

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- June 04, 2010 at 6:30 pm, JayJay said:
  
  Try typing sudo before gzip
  
  Reply
- March 16, 2011 at 2:37 pm, Shadur said:
  
  You’re not allowed to create a directory bin/cob32 in /ITS/release/hawai.
  
  Reply
February 20, 2011 at 10:42 pm, Cyril said:

I am under Solaris 10. tar command still has no “z” option.

Your tip comes in handy! Thanks.

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December 23, 2011 at 7:49 am, JEYAPRAKASH said:

BOSS VERY VERY THANK IT’S VERY VERY HELPFUL FOR ME
THAKS ONCE AGIAN

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