LinuxInstruct: Tutorials: Tar and Gzip

LinuxInstruct: Tutorials: (Un)Tar and (Un)Gzip

Br Brad Davis

Ok, so you have downloaded that new program that is supposed to do everything you have dreamed about. But it has the funny .tar.gz extention, what are you supposed to do?

Any files with the extention .gz or .Z are files that have been compressed by GNU's gzip. So you just need to uncompress it.
Try unzipping the file by running: gunzip file.tar.gz
That will take away the .gz and should leave you with just file.tar
ok, so know what???
create a new directory, using the mkdir command and move the .tar file into this directory, using the mv command.
Untar the file by running: tar -xvf file.tar
depending on who created the tar ball it should create itself a directory and then dump all the files that it contains in to that directory. But it might not, thats why we create a directory to untar the file inside.