How to Extract (Unzip) Tar Gz File
Updated
•4 min read

If you are roaming the open-source world, chances are you encounter .tar.gz files on a regular basis. Open-source packages are generally available to download in .tar.gz and .zip formats.
The tar
command is used to create tar archives by converting a group of files into an archive. It supports a vast range of compression programs such as gzip, bzip2, lzip, lzma, lzop, xz and compress. Tar was originally designed for creating archives to store files on magnetic tape which is why it has its name “Tape ARchive”.
Gzip is the most popular algorithm for compressing tar files. By convention, the name of a tar archive compressed with gzip should end with either .tar.gz or .tgz.
In short, a file that ends in .tar.gz is a .tar archive compressed with gzip.
The tar
command can also be used to extract tar archives, display a list of the files included in the archive, add additional files to an existing archive, as well as various other kinds of operations.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to extract (or unzip) tar.gz and tgz archives.
Extracting tar.gz File
Most Linux distributions and macOS comes with tar command pre-installed by default.
To extract a tar.gz file, use the --extract
(-x
) option and specify the archive file name after the f
option:
tar -xf archive.tar.gz
The tar
command will auto-detect compression type and will extract the archive. The same command can be used to extract tar archives compressed with other algorithms such as .tar.bz2
.
If you are a Desktop user and the command-line is not your thing you can use your File manager. To extract (unzip) a tar.gz file simply right-click on the file you want to extract and select “Extract”. Windows users will need a tool named 7zip to extract tar.gz files.
The -v
option will make the tar
command more visible and print the names of the files being extracted on the terminal.
tar -xvf archive.tar.gz
By default, tar
will extract the archive contents in the current working directory
. Use the --directory
(-C
) to extract archive files in a specific directory:
For example, to extract the archive contents to the /home/linuxize/files
directory, you can use:
tar -xf archive.tar.gz -C /home/linuxize/files
Extracting Specific Files from a tar.gz File
To extract a specific file(s) from a tar.gz file, append a space-separated list of file names to be extracted after the archive name:
tar -xf archive.tar.gz file1 file2
When extracting files, you must provide their exact names including the path, as printed by --list
(-t
).
Extracting one or more directories from an archive is the same as extracting files:
tar -xf archive.tar.gz dir1 dir2
If you try to extract a file that doesn’t exist, an error message similar to the following will be displayed:
tar -xf archive.tar.gz README
tar: README: Not found in archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
You can also extract files from a tar.gz file based on a wildcard pattern, by using the --wildcards
option and quoting the pattern to prevent the shell from interpreting it.
For example, to extract files whose names end in .js
(Javascript files), you would use:
tar -xf archive.tar.gz --wildcards '*.js'
Extracting tar.gz File from stdin
If you are extracting a compressed tar.gz file by reading the archive from stdin (usually through a pipe), you need to specify the decompression option. The option that tells tar to read the archives through gzip is -z
.
In the following example we are downloading the Blender
sources using the wget
command and pipe its output to the tar
command:
wget -c https://download.blender.org/source/blender-2.80.tar.gz -O - | sudo tar -xz
If you don’t specify a decompression option, tar
will indicate which option you should use:
tar: Archive is compressed. Use -z option
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
Listing tar.gz file
To list the content of a tar.gz file, use the --list
(-t
) option:
tar -tf archive.tar.gz
The output will look something like this:
file1
file2
file3
If you add the --verbose
(-v
) option, tar
will print more information, such as owner, file size, timestamp ..etc:
tar -tvf archive.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- linuxize/users 0 2019-02-15 01:19 file1
-rw-r--r-- linuxize/users 0 2019-02-15 01:19 file2
-rw-r--r-- linuxize/users 0 2019-02-15 01:19 file3
Conclusion
tar.gz file is a Tar archive
compressed with Gzip. To extract a tar.gz file, use the tar -xf
command followed by the archive name.
If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.