How to Extract/Unzip .tar.gz Files? [Linux & Windows]

What are tar.gz files?

A .tar.gz file, also known as a tarball, is a special file format comprising a collection of files compressed into a single archive. This particular file format is commonly used in Unix and Linux operating systems.

It is simply created by combining multiple files or directories into a single file and then compressing it using gzip compression.

You might be wondering, where the word tar came from, well the word “tar” was used from Tape Archiver, which was originally used for magnetic tape storage.

Just like the .zip files you may have heard about and even used, .tar files are also used to compress large files into a single package, making it convenient to store and send them through various channels such as emails, servers, etc.

At this moment, a question must have come to your mind, why don’t we simply use the .zip file format then? Why there is a need for a separate file format i.e. “.tar” to compress files?

Unzip .tar.gz in Linux using the tar utility

In the Linux operating system, the first thing you need to do is to open the Terminal by pressing the CTRL+ALT+T keywords simultaneously and enter the given command below:

1. Extracting .tar.gz to the current working directory and printing out the output

tar -xf Yourfile.tar.gz

In the above command,

• The “Tar” command will manipulate tar archives
• the “-x” option will tell “tar” to extract the files.
• “-f” specifies the file to be extracted. In the above command, it is followed by yourfile.tar.gz which shows the name of the compressed tarball file.

When you run this command, it will extract the contents of this particular tarball file, i.e “Yourfile.tar.gz” into the current working directory.

Note: The extracted files will be stored in the same directory where the command is executed. And also, do not forget to replace the “Yourfile.tar.gz” with the actual name of your compressed tarball file.

To Printing out the Output, enter the below command:

tar -xvf Yourfile.tar.gz

2. Extracting .tar.gz files to different working directory

tar -xf Yourfile.tar.gz -C /home/user/files

3. Extracting the files from the tar archive that has been compressed using gzip

tar –xvzf Yourfile.tar.gz

• tar: This is the basic command for working with tar archives.
• -x: Stands for extract, which means you want to extract files from the archive.
• -v: Stands for verbose, which provides more details about the extraction process, displaying the names of the files as they are extracted.
• -z: Indicates that the archive is compressed using gzip.
• -f: Specifies the filename of the archive.

The command will extract the contents of the archive while providing a verbose output of the process.

4. In case you want to see the list of contents in a .tar file before extracting it, enter the command given below:

tar –tzf Yourfile.tar.gz

5. If you want to put the extracted unzipped files into a specific directory, enter the following commands:

tar –xvzf Yourfile.tar.gz –C /home/user/destination

6. If you want to extract only a specific file or Directory from .tar.gz file

Suppose, you want to extract a particular file say “Yourfile” and a directory say “Directory1” from the .tar.gz file to the current working directory. In this case, the command should be like,

tar -xf Yourfile.tar.gz file1 directory1

All you have to just add a space between the files you want to extract.

Note: Please, mention the exact filename in the command, or else it will show an error. Therefore, verify the file name that is listed in the.tar file. To view the contents of the .tar file you can use the “tar –tzf Yourfile.tar.gz” command.

7. If you want to extract a certain type of extension file or name, use the following commands:

tar -xf Yourfile.tar.gz --wildcards '*.txt'

This command will extract all the .txt extension files from the .tar.gz file.

8. If you want to create a .tar.gz file instead, enter the below command:

tar –cvzf NewFile.tar.gz ~/Documents

This command will create a compressed tar archive of the contents of the ~/Documents directory, i.e. located at /home/user/Documents directory into a single file, NewFile.tar.gz.

9. Add multiple files to a tar file

tar -cvf Yourfile.tar ~/Documents

This command will add files by copying the contents of your documents folder into Yourfile.tar.

Extracting .tar.gz files using the gzip utility

The Gzip command is particularly used for compressing and decompressing files. However, in case you want to extract a .tar.gz file, you need to use the tar command as well as the gzip command in the combination.

Gzip by default, extracts the file in the current directory.

gzip -d yourfile.tar.gz

Here you need to replace yourfile.tar.gz with the actual name of your .tar.gz file and the -d option will tell gzip to decompress the file. After decompressing the gzip file, you will have a tar archive and you can proceed further by extracting the tar archive using the tar command.

Extracting .tar.gz files using stdin

If you have a tar.gz file that you want to extract from standard input (stdin), you can use the tar command with the -z option for decompression.

Let’s understand this with an example. Suppose we need to download a file from the URL ‘www.wpoven.com/yourfile‘. In this case, we can use the wget command and pipe its output to the tar command.

wget -c https://Wpoven.com/Yourfile.tar.gz -O - | sudo tar -xz