The author combines expert insights with user-centric guidance, rigorously researching and testing to ensure you receive trustworthy, easy-to-follow tech guides. Once you complete the steps, you will have all the files and folders extracted to the destination path you specified after a few moments. This guide will teach you the steps to use native tar commands on Windows 10 from Command Prompt and Ubuntu to extract the content of a .tar.gz file. 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. Some third-party tools also offer extended flexibility for converting between file types, saving more time if you want to change between compression formats.
You can use the -C option to extract to a different directory (in this case, /home/user/files). 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. Whether you prefer command-line tools or graphical file archivers, the extraction process is pretty simple. Mauro Huculak is a Windows How-To Expert who started Pureinfotech in 2010 as an independent online publication. Mauro has over 15 years of experience writing comprehensive guides and creating professional videos about Windows and software, including Android and Linux.
Is .tar.gz same as .zip?
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. However, third-party tools like 7-Zip, WinRAR, or intermediate capital broker views icp broker ratings WinZip can help you extract these files. For this guide, we’ll use 7-Zip, a free and open-source file archiver with a high compression ratio. Although tar files are usually more common on Linux distros (for example, Ubuntu) and macOS for backups and archival, you may also come across these files on Windows 11. You could use third-party tools like 7-Zip and PeaZip, but these are not recommended as they don’t always work to extra .tar.gz files.
You’ll want to replace “tarfile” with the path to the tar.gz file that you’re trying to extract. For a more detailed explanation on how the tar command works, be sure to read our guide to compressing and extracting files in the Linux Terminal. The tar command is extremely powerful, and you can do things like list or search for files in a tar archive, or extract a single file. This command extracts (-x) the file (-f) specified (in this case, filename.tar.gz) to the current directory. Note that this command also works with other common 25 exchanges to buy bitcoin in the united states bitcoin guides compression formats such as .tar.bz2.
Using the command line (cmd)
You can even use a Linux distro through the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to quickly extract tarballs created on another platform. As we see later, different compression utilities may require different methods for extracting and unzipping files. Though we mostly focus on .tar.gz files, check out the end of the article for some quick tips on extracting .tar files in other formats. 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.
Instead, you should be using the native tar support available on Windows 11 or a Linux distro in WSL. Since .tar.gz 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 are more space-efficient (i.e., smaller) than the same collection compressed as a .zip. 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.
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You can also use The Unarchiver, which is a free tool for managing archives, functions just like the Archive Utility, and supports .rar files as well. For those that don’t like using a terminal, you’ll be delighted to hear that macOS can open tar and tar.gz files by default with the Archive Utility. Just replace the -x with a -c to “Create,” though I find it easier to remember by “Compress,” even though that’s -z’s job.
- For this guide, we’ll use 7-Zip, a free and open-source file archiver with a high compression ratio.
- WinRAR is yet another popular file archiver tool widely used by users around the world to compress and uncompress files.
- Unlike Windows’ convenient graphical user interface (GUI) for unzipping .zip files, you need to use the tar utility through the command line.
- After the option, you have to specify the path of the tarball file to extract.
Is .gz a .tar file?
As a result, it has become a common file extension for many open-source software packages and other resources. WinRAR is yet another popular file archiver tool widely used by users around the world to compress and uncompress files. You can use it to easily open, view and extract any .gz, tar.gz or .tar cryptocurrency regulation around the world in 2019 ranked! file. 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.
As a result, we recommend sticking to free (but trustworthy) tools or simply using the command line. While there are many tools to choose from, the most popular include 7-Zip and WinZip. While slightly different, they are quite lightweight and offer a much simpler alternative to using the command line. You can also add the verbose output option (-v) to provide detailed listings, including dates, securities/permissions, and more. 7-Zip is lightweight and does the job well, though it takes two steps to open tar.gz files.