Regardless of your personal preference, when working in Linux you will encounter TAR GZ archives sooner or later. Not a big deal when a full blown graphical desktop environment runs on your PC. These ship with GUI programs to create and extract TAR GZ archive. Think of File Roller for the Gnome desktop environment and Ark for the KDE desktop environment. Personally, I use Double Commander as my file manager, which has build-in functionality to create and extract TAR GZ archives.

Canonical released its first official version of the OS, Ubuntu 4.10, codenamed ‘Warty Warthog’ in October 2004. Canonical released its first official version of the OS, Ubuntu 4.10, codenamed ‘Warty Warthog’ in October 2004. For more information and to schedule a live demo, contact a hosting expert from Kinsta today. While there are many tools to choose from, the most popular include 7-Zip and WinZip.

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

Though both .zip and .tar.gz archive and compress files, they do so in different ways. In other words, .zip is a collection of compressed files, while .tar.gz is a compressed collection of files. The tar program makes it possible to quickly create and extract TAR GZ archives from the command line in Linux. When creating a TAR GZ archive, you basically pack a collection of files together (the TAR part) and then compress the archive (the GZ part).

How to Unzip .tar.gz in Linux using tar

1. Historically, the main reason was to archive files.
2. 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.
3. The tar program makes it possible to quickly create and extract TAR GZ archives from the command line in Linux.
4. A GUI is more suitable for beginners than a command-line tool.
5. These are popular for organizations and users who require a reliable and well-supported Ubuntu operating system.
6. Some common examples include .tar.bz2 (bzip2), .tar.br (Brotli), and .tar.zst (zstd), among many others.

Therefore, knowing how to open or untar tar.gz files is very useful. The files in the archive will be extracted to the current directory. Note the two other compression formats available – .bzip2 and ex – these are less frequently used, but you still may occasionally run into them. In this example, the user tried to extract the file titled “FILE” from filename.tar.gz. However, tar was unable to find FILE within .tar.gz, meaning that the how to install node js locally with nvm by mario kandut user either misspelled the name or that the file simply doesn’t exist in filename.tar.gz.

What is a Tar.gz File?

Another common cause of errors is case sensitivity, where Linux treats “FILE” and “file” as two separate entities. If you want to keep the original file after compression, there are two options. The first is the -k option, and the other uses the -c option to output the compressed file to a different file, preserving the original. You can easily unzip the resulting .tar.gz file with the decompress (-d) option.

Since this TAR GZ archive holds files for a website, you probably want extract the TAR GZ archive directly to the bitcoin flash crash sees biggest price drop in cryptocurrency history /var/ directory. By default the Apache HTTP server serves web pages from this directory on Debian/Ubuntu based systems. Since we’ll be creating and extracting TAR GZ archives, we’ll need at least some files in a few directories for testing purposes. Instead of creating a bunch of dummy files and directories, we might as well download the latest WordPress archive. In the shell, you can add a file or directory to a tar archive as long as it is not compressed. If your archive has been compressed, you must uncompress it, but you do not need to unarchive it.

Listing the Contents of an Archive

Once you’ve done this successfully, you’ll notice that the icon for tar.gz files will change to a 7-Zip icon. Tar.gz has become the standard format used for distributing Linux and open source software since it’s easy to extract on basically any platform that isn’t Windows. Long term Linux enthusiast, open source software developer and technical writer.

So to store files away that you no longer need to work with on a regular basis, but also do not want to delete. Packing these files in one compressed archive made them easy to move around and required less disk space. Nowadays, with the Internet fully integrated in our daily lives, TAR GZ archives offer a great solution how to report a crypto scam for sharing files with others. Think of e-mail attachment as one prominent example.

However, there are some pretty major differences when it comes to accessing data within the files and the compression efficiency. This is because most versions of tar allow both gnu and bsd style options (simplistically, gnu requires a hyphen, bsd doesn’t). While working in Linux, you will encounter TAR GZ archives sooner or later. This article explained how to create and extract TAR GZ archives using the command line in Linux. It did so with the help of hands-on examples, based on the WordPress TAR GZ archive. Historically, the main reason was to archive files.