Decompress and extract a tgz or tar.gz archive in a single step
Posted September 15, 2003 by Quinn McHenry in UNIX
Last Updated on
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
View more articles by Quinn McHenry
The Conversation
Follow the reactions below and share your own thoughts.