As a result, we recommend sticking to free (but trustworthy) tools or simply using the command line. To access the Windows command line, search for “command prompt” or “cmd” in the search bar. Right-click the first result and select the “Run as administrator” option. You can also add the cryptocurrency litecoin exchange binance bittrex verbose output option (-v) to provide detailed listings, including dates, securities/permissions, and more. You can also use –wildcards to extract all files with a certain extension or name. Otherwise, keep reading to learn how to unzip .tar.gz files in Linux, macOS, and Windows.
This error usually occurs when a .tar has been saved as a .gz despite having never been compressed using the gzip utility. 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. Where .zip files consist of many individually compressed files, .tar files are compressed as a single package, leaving its files uncompressed. In other words, .zip files are a collection of compressed files, while .tar files are a compressed collection of files.
- On Linux, BSD, Illumos, and even Mac OS, the tar command is already installed for you.
- Thankfully, unless you’re somehow missing your tar or gzip utility, most common errors are very easy to fix.
- However, while tools like 7-Zip are free, many more “robust” solutions are only available for a price after a trial period.
Users can utilize the 7-zip command-line interface for automated & scripted extraction tasks. To unzip the .tar.gz files, you’ll need to use specific commands and tools depending on your operating system. Let’s explore the extraction process for both Linux & Windows platforms. Since .tar.gz how to buy vertcoin compresses multiple files all at once, it can take advantage of similarities between individual files to save on space. Generally speaking, a collection of files archived and compressed as a .tar.gz will be more space-efficient (i.e., smaller) than the same collection compressed as a .zip.
Zip and Unzip .tar and .tar.gz in Linux with gzip
This is good and pretty comprehensive, Seth.One thing to point out is that, since .jpg and .png files are already compressed, you won’t get much compression with gzip. 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.
This is because most versions of tar allow both gnu and bsd style options (simplistically, gnu requires a hyphen, bsd doesn’t). This format is common in the Unix/Linux world and is widely used to create compressed archives. But it does not compress the data, which results in a larger file size compared to compressed formats. You can open most .tar.gz files using the tar command built in to Linux, macOS, and Windows 10. If you’re not comfortable with the terminal or command line, third-party tools such as 7-Zip offer a more user-friendly alternative.
The .gz extension represents the gzip compression format, which can be applied to almost any file format to compress data and save space. With the command prompt open, use the appropriate commands to change the current working directory (cd) to the location of the .tar.gz file you want to unzip. Alternatively, you can also specify a source and destination file path when using the tar utility. Unlike Windows’ convenient graphical user interface (GUI) for unzipping .zip files, you’ll need to use the tar utility through the command line.
The extraction method is precisely the same for tar files that have compression, such as.tar.gz,.tar.bz2, and others. Where commands have little (if any) room for typos or omissions, many common errors are the result of small mistakes, misspellings, or incorrect formats. Thankfully, unless you’re somehow missing your tar or gzip utility, bitcoin and cryptocurrencies most common errors are very easy to fix. Like the tar utility, gzip also allows you to zip and unzip multiple files or entire directories at a time. The tar command also provides support for extracting only specific files or directories from a .tar.gz file. Simply add a space-separated list of the files you want to extract.
However, Windows 10 users may also come across these files, which is a reason to have a way to extract their contents. A file using .tar.gz format is a file that has been created using the Unix-based archival application tar and then compressed using the gzip compression. These files are often referred to as “tarballs.” While you can find them with a double extension (.tar.gz), the extension can also be shortened to .tgz or .gz. In Linux, users have multiple ways to extract .tar.gz files – through the terminal and graphical file archivers.
Using the Command Line (cmd)
This error occurs if you try to decompress a file without specifying a decompression utility, specifically -z for gzip. It’s often useful to list the contents of a .tar.gz file without having to unzip the entire archive. Again, the above commands will extract to the current working directory by default. You can use the -C option to extract to a different directory (in this case, /home/user/files).
As a result, one isn’t necessarily better than the other — it’s all a matter of application. The Dolphin file manager offers a feature to autodetect whether the files extracted from an archive are contained in a directory or if a new directory needs to be created for them. I use this option so that when I extract files from a tarbomb, they remain tidy and contained. 7-Zip is a free and open-source tool with high compression ratios & supports a wide range of archive formats. It offers AES-256 encryption to protect sensitive data within archives.
It also integrates with the Windows Explorer context menu, which enables users to create and extract archives directly from the right-click menu. You can easily extract .tar.gz files using third-party tools like 7 zip and Winrar on the Windows system. You can notice in the above image that the archive files are extracted in the same working directory. Then we’ll jump into the step-by-step process of unzipping on both Linux and Windows platforms. The command extracts files to a new directory called example1, which is located in the current directory.
Is .tar.gz The Same As .zip?
It just bundles files & directories together while preserving their file structure and metadata. This means it takes all the specified files and puts them together into one container. On Linux, BSD, Illumos, and even Mac OS, the tar command is already installed for you. Here’s a guide to uninstall BetterDiscord to help you get on the legal side. You may also be interested in learning about the best WinZip alternatives to compress files.
People new to the tar format usually equate it to a .zip file, but a tar archive is notably not compressed. The tar format only creates a container for files, but the files can be compressed with separate utilities. Common compressions applied to a .tar file are Gzip, bzip2, and xz. That’s why you rarely see just a .tar file and more commonly encounter .tar.gz or .tgz files. 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.
.tar vs .tar.gz Files
While the tar utility is enough for most purposes, you’ll need the gzip utility to create .tar.gz files. Though gzip is the most common compression utility, it’s not the only one. As you might imagine, using a different compression utility on a .tar file will result in a different double extension. Some common examples include .tar.bz2 (bzip2), .tar.br (Brotli), and .tar.zst (zstd), among many others. Technical details aside, all you need to remember is that .zip files are more accessible but less space-efficient, while .tar files are less accessible but more space-efficient.
However, Windows 10 includes native support for tar files, and you can use Command Prompt to extract these files. Or you can even use the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) that includes native support for Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, and many other distros. Therefore, you can also access many Linux tools, including tar, to quickly extract content from tarballs. Usually, tar files are more common with Ubuntu (other Linux distros) and macOS users for data archival and backups.
It is assumed that you are extracting a tarball created on another system. We are skipping some arguments usually necessary to preserve permissions, which on Windows 10 are not required to access the files. I had a lot of fun, three years ago or so, running a bunch of tests with different compression methods, and it was very enlightening to see how various files took to compression.