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

Contributor Icon Contributed by qmchenry Date Icon September 15, 2003  
Tag Icon Tagged: 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 -

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  • Jeff
    this is easier:

    # tar xvzf target.tar.gz
  • 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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