Opening a .tar.gz file with a single command [closed]

Question

When I download a .tar.gz file, I open it with two commands, first gunzip and then tar.

Is it possible to open it with just one command?

Partida

i think this would better fit superuser or serverfault. – Canon

Answer 1

tar xzf file.tar.gz

The letters are:

• x - extract
• z - gunzip the input
• f - Read from a file, not stdin

Fawnfawna

This is correct. The only thing that I would add is that z usually only works on gnu tar. The typical UNIX tar won't have this in my experience at least. – Tiga

tar xf file.tar if you have file.tar. – Secondguess

If you are working with a very large .tgz file, and unzipping it to the same file system will result in an out of disk space error, you can add --directory /existing/target/directory where /existing/target/directory is on another file system that has sufficient space. This is especially handy if said destination file system can't handle files as large as the particular .tgz file. In this case adding v to the options as mentioned in @WiseTechi 's answer (and other answers) can be useful so you know it is actually working as desired. – Jackiejackinoffice

Answer 2

You can use tar with a "z" argument

tar xvfz mytar.tar.gz

Iconology

what does the 'v' argument do? – Seafood

v stands for "verbose" - I like to see what my command is doing – Iconology

in fact, for extract x mode, you don't have to specify z with newer tar -- it is autodetected (GNU tar 1.20+). – Obe

Answer 3

If you don't have gnu tar it is still possible to open the file in a single step (although technically still two commands) using a pipe

zcat file.tar.gz |tar x

Atlante

Answer 4

The only thing that I would add is that z usually only works on gnu tar. The typical UNIX tar won't have this in my experience at least. – Jon Mar 16 at 16:19

The z option works well on my OS X v10.5 (Leopard) as well.

When it comes to memorizing, I think it´s easy to think of what you want and not just some letters.

1. If you want to create an archive, then c will be the first option, else x will be the first option if you want to extract.
2. If you want to compress/decompress with the gzip/gunzip program, then the next option should be z for zip. (All archives ending with .gz must be unzipped with the z option)
3. The last mandatory option is f for the file.

Then you usually end up with these two commands:

• tar czf file.tar.gz /folder_to_archive/*
• tar xzf file.tar.gz

Microbalance

Answer 5

How do I extract a gz file?

Use the guzip command as follows:

gunzip file.gz

Or

gzip -d file.gz

How do I extract a tar.gz or .tgz file?

Files with extension tar.gz or .tgz are tar files compressed with gzip. On Unix system extract them with following command:

gunzip < file.tar.gz | tar xvf -
gunzip < file.tgz | tar xvf -

If you have GNU tar (Linux system) you can use the z option directly:

tar xvzf file.tar.gz
tar xvzf file.tgz

To read more, see Linux / UNIX command to open .gz files.

Gauvin

Answer 6

Untar Single file from tar File compressed file

To extract a single file called video.mpeg from video.tar use the following command as given below example.

# tar -xvf video.tar video.mpeg

video.mpeg

Extracting Single file from tar.gz File

Use the following command to extract a single file codefile.xml from websitecode.tar.gz archive file

# tar -zxvf websitecode.tar.gz code.xml

code.xml

Extracting Single file from tar.bz2 File

Use the command to extract single file file.html from websitecode.tar.bz2

# tar -jxvfwebsitecode.tar.bz2 home/website/file.html

/home/website/file.html

Also you can read more about all the tar commands at This link explains all the useful tar commands available in linux

Reikoreilly

Answer 7

On Windows, try the tartool utility.

It's free and the code is open source and uses the SharpZipLib library.

Disclaimer: I am the author of this utility.

Natural

Answer 8

Nowadays tar decompresses automatically if needed. It is enough to write:

tar xf file.tar.gz

Mnemonic: extract file

Denisdenise