This ensures that your backup remains unaffected and the files don’t corrupt if anything breaks on your system. The -C option is used to specify a different directory other than the current working directory. Most Linux distributions come with the tar command pre-installed by default.
gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
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 user either misspelled the name or that the file simply doesn’t exist in filename.tar.gz. Another common cause of errors is case sensitivity, where Linux treats “FILE” and “file” as two separate entities. If you want to unzip the files to a different folder, click on the Extract To option. Choose the appropriate location and click Select to extract the file to that location.
How to Install Docker Desktop on Linux Mint 22
The system will extract all the files to your current directory by default. File compression is a great way to save storage on a computer. If you’re familiar with packages in Linux, you may have come across a TAR or a TAR.GZ file.
How to Unzip .tar.gz in Linux using tar
You can use the official GNU gzip utility to extract the content of the compressed archive file. If the file you’re looking at is a TAR.GZ, using either tar or 7-Zip to extract the file will be a much simpler choice. The collective -xvzf flag stands for Extract, Verbose, gzip, and Filename respectively.
These are popular for organizations and users becoming a blockchain developer who require a reliable and well-supported Ubuntu operating system. Now you know how to untar a tar.gz file in Linux. Perhaps you might also be interested in learning how to unzip files in Linux. The easiest way to open a tar.gz file on Windows is to install an excellent free utility called 7-Zip, which can handle tar.gz and just about any other file format. We’ve been recommending this app for years, and it’s one of the first things that we install whenever reinstalling Windows.
Only extract specific files or directories from .tar.gz in Linux
- While slightly different, they are quite lightweight and offer a much simpler alternative to using the command line.
- You can easily unzip the resulting .tar.gz file with the decompress (-d) option.
- As we see later, different compression utilities may require different methods for extracting and unzipping files.
- Most Linux distributions ship with a preinstalled archive manager.
- For sending and storing, both .zip and .tar.gz files allows you to send relatively large packages as a single file.
Decompressing TAR and TAR.GZ files is only a matter of few clicks using the GUI. This example uses example1.tar.gz in the Home directory. File compression and extraction is part of system administration. You must perform these operations using the applications that come with the operating system itself. Here I have a wrapper archive which internally contains 2 nested gzip archives.
Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to white label program search. However, while tools like 7-Zip are free, many more “robust” solutions are only available for a price after a trial period. As a result, we recommend sticking to free (but trustworthy) tools or simply using the command line. 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.
Ubuntu versions are usually named using an alliterative adjective and an animal name, both starting with the same letter. Once you’ve done this successfully, you’ll notice that the icon for tar.gz files will change to a 7-Zip icon. Once you choose the directory, click the Select button in the top right corner.
It may sound like a silly mistake, but it’s surprisingly common in situations where users directly rename files and their extensions (such as .tar and .gz) in the process. You can create your own compressed .tar files using compression utilities such as gzip. Gzip is one of the most popular and available options, especially since it comes built in to most Linux distributions and macOS. 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.
But to be able to know the filename, we must check the content of the archive. So we can list the content of the archive without actually extracting everything by using -tz argument where -t is for –list i.e. list the contents of the archive. You can open most .tar.gz files using the the best interactive cheat sheet tar command built in to Linux, macOS, and Windows 10.
