Compression provides more disk space and network efficiency in IT systems. There are different types, levels, and performance compression algorithms. tar.gz is defacto standard for Linux systems for a long time. In this tutorial, we will look at different ways to unzip or uncompress tar.gz files.
Unzip with tar Command
tar is our old friend who can provide compress and decompress of a lot of different compression formats. We will unzip test.tar.gz in this example with x,v and f options.
xis used to extractvis used for verbose modefis used for file mode
$ tar xvf test.tar.gz
Extract Specific File From A tar.gz
We can extract a specific file from an *.tar.gz archive. We will just provide the file or directory name we want to extract to the end of the command. First listing the contents of the *.tar.gz file content and then providing the file name precisely. We will list file contents with the -tf option and extract the file named setup.py with the xf like below.
$ tar -tf zipstream-1.1.4.tar.gzand extract a specific file.
$ tar -xf zipstream-1.1.4.tar.gz zipstream-1.1.4/setup.py
Unzip From Stdin or Standard Input
Linux is a very elastic operating system that provides different original features. Standard input can be used for a tar.gz file. We can unzip a *.tar.gz data that will be fed from the standard input. We will use the | in order to redirect the file to the tar command. In this example, we will download the Linux kernel from kernel.org and redirect it to the tar command.
$ wget -c http://ftp.itu.edu.tr/Mirror/Apache//httpd/httpd-2.4.39.tar.gz -O - | tar -xzUnzip with gunzip Command
gunzip is the unzip command provided by gzip suite. We can use this command without any option in order to unzip. But in this example, we use -voption which is used for verbose mode.
$ gunzip -v test.tar.gzUnzip with 7z Command
7z is my favorite compression algorithm and tool. It supports a lot of formats from zip to rar. gz format is also supported. We can provide e option in order to extract the tar.gz . 7z automatically detects the format.
$ 7z e test.tar.gz
List tar.gz Contents
If we want to unzip only some of the files from a tar.gz archive first we need to list files. We can list files different ways but we will look only single command which is tar.
$ tar tvf test.tar.gz
Unzip Only Specified Directory
If we need to extract only some of the files or directories we need to specify them. We will use unzip command and provide the files and directories at the end of the command we want to extract. In this example, we will extract the file oldbackup/db.conf file from tar.gz file.
$ tar xvf test.tar.gz oldbackup/db.conf