Linux How To Open / Extract tar.gz

Opening or extracting a tar.gz file is very easy on Linux.

Extract a tar.gz file using a single command:

tar xvfz example.tar.gz

These are the parameters that we used.

x	extract
v	verbose output
f	operate on a file
z	gunzip it first

Extract the file using two separate commands. First gunzip and then unpack the tar file.

gunzip example.tar.gz
tar xvf example.tar

You can also specify a directory that you want to extract to like this:

tar -xf example.tar.gz -C /home/user1/dir1

You can choose to only extract specific files if you want:

tar -xf example.tar.gz test1 test2

If you just want to see the contents of the file use this command:

tar -tvf example.tar.gz