How to quickly extract tar.gz files on Windows 10

The Ubuntu logo, often called the “Circle of Friends,” comprises three people holding hands. It signifies the strong sense of community and interconnectedness at the core of Ubuntu’s philosophy. Ubuntu is a Southern African philosophy and term originating from South Africa and Zimbabwe.

I had a lot of fun, three years restaurant app builder restaurant app development 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. If you have an existing tarball and want to add a new file into it, you don’t have to unarchive everything just to add a new file. A tar archive is often referred to as a tarball, presumably because we hackers love to shorten words to as few syllables as possible, and “tarball” is shorter and easier than “tar archive.” 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.

1. The first is the -k option, and the other uses the -c option to output the compressed file to a different file, preserving the original.
2. Ubuntu LTS (Long-Term Support) versions, known for their stability and extended support periods, are typically released every two years in April.
3. You can also use –wildcards to extract all files with a certain extension or name.
4. We only need to add the -z option when we’re extracting files from a .tar.gz file.
5. Thankfully, you don’t need to be a 1960s computer technician to use and extract .tar files – nor do modern .tar files even have anything to do with old computers.

You can easily extract .tar.gz files using third-party tools like 7 zip and Winrar on the Windows system. But it does not compress the data, which results in a larger file size compared to compressed formats. You can easily unzip the resulting .tar.gz file with the decompress (-d) option.

Installing tar

This article provides detailed guides to unzip .tar.gz files in Linux and Windows, as well as a few helpful tips and tricks. Sometimes you need to view the content of a tar file as it collects many files and ensures if a specific file is present. Files that have a .tar.gz or a .tar.bz2 extension are compressed archive files. A file with just a .tar extension is uncompressed, but those will be very rare. This is because most versions of tar allow both gnu and bsd style options (simplistically, gnu requires a hyphen, bsd doesn’t). It is assumed that you are extracting a tarball created on another system.

Using the command line (cmd)

Also, its trial version does not have time limitations, and users can still use it even after the trial period has expired, with occasional reminders to purchase the license. Once you’ve selected the right file, you’ll see “7-Zip File Manager” show up in the select app dialog. If you want 7-Zip to always handle tar.gz files in the future, you’re going to want to select the “Always” button at the bottom of the dialog. Once you’ve downloaded and installed 7-Zip, double-click on the tar.gz file that you’re trying to open, and then select “Choose an app on your PC” from the popup dialog that shows up. Similar to the previous error, this error occurs when an archive was saved as a .tar despite not being a .tar archive.

gzip: stdin: not in gzip format

Gzip compression uses a checksum to make sure data integrity. When you extract files from a .tar.gz archive, the checksum is automatically verified to detect & handle any potential data corruption. As already discussed, The .tar format allows bundling multiple files into a single file which makes it easier to organize related data or complex directory structures into a single archive. Like the tar utility, gzip also allows you to zip and unzip multiple files or entire directories at a time. Though gzip is the most common compression utility, it’s not the only one.

If you’ve received a tarball from a friend or a software project, you can extract it in either your GUI desktop or in a shell. In a GUI, right-click the archive you want to extract and select “Extract.” Many of the downloadable Linux/Unix files found on the internet are compressed using a tar.gz format. Therefore, knowing how to open or untar tar.gz files is very useful.

The .tar portion of the file extension stands for tape archive, and is the reason that both of these file types are called tar files. Tar files date all the way back to 1979 when the tar command was created to allow system administrators guides to open bitcoin wallet account 2021 to archive files onto tape. Forty years later we are still using the tar command to extract tar files on to our hard drives. Someone somewhere is probably still using tar with tape. WinRAR is a popular file compression & archive utility software.

What are .tar and .tar.gz files?

For sending and storing, both .zip and .tar.gz files allows you to send relatively large packages as a single file. However, there are some pretty major differences when it comes to accessing data within the files and the compression efficiency. Of course, that’s not to say .tar files are some kind of “lesser” format than .zip. Rather, they both accomplish the same task (file compression) in the same way. Given this structure, the site admin could extract your incoming archive directly to the server’s root directory.

Once you choose the directory, click the Select button in the top right corner. On Windows 10, to use tar on Linux, you need to install the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and a distro like Ubuntu from the Microsoft Store. This simplifies file management and reduces the risk of data loss during transfers.

This example uses example1.tar.gz in the Home directory. The output shows a newly created archive example1.tar.gz. That means users can download and use it for free during a trial period.

This error occurs when trying to extract specific files or directories from a .tar.gz file using tar. Some third-party tools also offer extended flexibility for converting between file types‌, saving more time if you want to change between compression formats. Note that this command will throw how to buy polygon matic an error unless you specify the exact filename listed in the .tar file. As we cover more in the next section, you can verify file names by listing contents with the tar -tf filename.tar.gz command. Compressing and extracting these files, however, isn’t always intuitive.

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. As a result, one isn’t necessarily better than the other — it’s all a matter of application.