How To Extract and Unzip tar.gz Files for Linux & Windows

The .gz extension represents the gzip compression format, which can be applied to almost any file format to compress data and save space. 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. From videos to entire software packages, many files are compressed and stored using the .tar.gz format. While extracting a .tar.gz file isn’t quite as easy as unzipping a .zip, it’s still pretty straightforward. 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. To extract a .tar.gz file on Windows, you will need a file compression tool that supports this format.

Extract a Single Directory from a Tarball

Running this command performs the untar tar.gz operation only on the files named FileName1 and FileName2 in the tar.gz file named “CompressedFile”. The -p (parents) option causes mkdir to create any parent directories that are required, ensuring the target directory is created. Files that have a .tar.gz or a .tar.bz2 extension are compressed archive files. A file with just a .tar extension is uncompressed, but those will be very rare. If the command line isn’t your thing, there are plenty of user-friendly tools available to unzip tar.gz files. Thankfully, you don’t need to be a 1960s computer technician to use and extract .tar files – nor do modern .tar files even have anything to do with old computers.

Online Tools

Since .tar.gz compresses multiple files all at once, it can take advantage of similarities between individual files to save on space. Generally speaking, a collection of files archived and compressed as a .tar.gz are more space-efficient (i.e., smaller) than the same collection compressed as a .zip. This error occurs when trying to extract specific files or directories from a .tar.gz file using tar.

Before you untar tar.gz file, if you want to be sure if that is the correct file to “untar”, it is a good idea to view the contents of the file before extracting. The easiest way to do that is via the “-t” option of tar command. Let us look at the basic syntax to view the contents of a tar.gz file without extracting. Extract all content nvidia to restrict the rtx 3060’s ability to mine cryptocurrency with tar command, extract a specific file and list the files without extracting them. The most often used algorithm for compressing tar files is Gzip.

How do I use gunzip and tar to extract my tar.gz file to the specific directory I want?

As you might imagine, using a different compression utility on a .tar file will result in a different double extension. Some common examples include .tar.bz2 (bzip2), .tar.br (Brotli), and .tar.zst (zstd), among many others. Several operations involving multiple files might store and compress the result in a .tar.gz format. It’s an alternative to the ubiquitous ZIP format and popular among backup and archiving tools, especially in Unix or Linux operating systems. If you want to see the progress of the extraction, you can use the -v option, which makes the tar command more verbose and prints the names of the files being extracted. This error usually occurs when a .tar has been saved as a .gz despite having never been compressed using the gzip utility.

A “.tar” file is a collection of best uk crypto exchange uk files compressed into a single file or archive. Short for “Tape ARchive,” the name “TAR” is a throwback to when files were stored on magnetic tape drives. In this guide, you will learn how to extract or unzip .tar.gz files in Linux.

• You can open most .tar.gz files using the tar command built in to Linux, macOS, and Windows 10.
• You just need to use the appropriate tar command line options.
• However, tar was unable to find FILE within .tar.gz, meaning that the user either misspelled the name or that the file simply doesn’t exist in filename.tar.gz.
• The output shows a newly created archive example1.tar.gz.

Even though most of us have hard drives instead of magnetic tape, we still call them tar files. If you want to create your own tar.gz file, you can use the tar command with the -c option, which tells tar how much energy does bitcoin use to create a new archive. You also need to use the -z option to compress the archive with gzip, and the -f option to specify the file name.

What’s the difference between .tar and .tar.gz files?

Though we mostly focus on .tar.gz files, check out the end of the article for some quick tips on extracting .tar files in other formats. The .gz or .bz2 extension suffix indicates that the archive has been compressed, using either the gzip or bzip2 compression algorithm. The tar command will work happily with both types of file, so it doesn’t matter which compression method was used — and it should be available everywhere you have a Bash shell. You just need to use the appropriate tar command line options. While every tar.gz file is a .tar archive, not every .gz is a .tar file.

You’ll notice that you don’t need to use the -z option to list the files. You only need to add the -z option when you’re extracting files from a .tar.gz file. The Tar program lets you store files on magnetic tape.