Though both .zip and .tar.gz archive and compress files, they do so in different ways. In other words, .zip is a collection of compressed files, while .tar.gz is a compressed collection of files. If you’re using a graphical Linux desktop, you could also use the file-compression utility or file manager included with your desktop to create or extract .tar files. On Windows, you can extract and create .tar archives with the free 7-Zip utility. Where .zip files consist of many individually compressed files, .tar files are compressed as a single package, leaving its files uncompressed. In other words, .zip files are a collection of compressed files, while .tar files are a compressed collection of files.
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In some cases, you may wish to compress an entire directory, but not include certain files and directories. You can do so by appending an –exclude switch for each directory or file you want to exclude. If we list the files in the Download directory we will see that another directory called Guitar Songs has been created. Knowing how to unzip a .tar.gz file allows users to extract and access the archives’ contents efficiently. This error occurs if you try to decompress a file without specifying a decompression utility, specifically -z for gzip. For sending and storing, both .zip and .tar.gz files allows you to send relatively large packages as a single file.
The .gz extension represents the gzip compression format, what is a devops engineer which can be applied to almost any file format to compress data and save space. You can create your own compressed .tar files using compression utilities such as gzip. Gzip is one of the most popular and available options, especially since it comes built in to most Linux distributions and macOS.
To do this we’ll use almost exactly the same command as before but with one important difference. The .bz2 extension suffix tells us it has been compressed using the bzip2 command. Instead of using the-z (gzip) option, we will use the -j (bzip2) option to unzip the bz2 file.
- Use the following command to compress an entire directory or a single file on Linux.
- If the file is a bzip2-compressed file, replace the “z” in the above commands with a “j”.
- You can do so by appending the -C switch to the end of the command.
Is .gz a .tar file?
The command extracts files to a new directory called example1, which is located in the current directory. A user-friendly way to extract files from a .tar.gz archive is via a Graphical User Interface (GUI). A GUI is more suitable for beginners than a command-line tool. It’s easy to get confused when navigating between .tar, .tar.gz, and .gz – not to mention zipping and unzipping them. Here are a few frequently asked questions we commonly hear from users working with .tar.gz files. If you want to keep the original file after compression, there are two options.
How to Zip and Unzip or Extract TAR and TAR.GZ Files
Apart from occupying less space on your system storage, compressed archives utilize less server bandwidth when downloaded by multiple users. You may want to extract the contents of the matching engine archive to a specific directory. You can do so by appending the -C switch to the end of the command.
This is the simplest possible usage of the tar command. The command includes a large number of additional options, so we can’t possibly list them all here. Run the info tar command at the shell to view the tar command’s detailed information page. how to buy binance Press the q key to quit the information page when you’re done. If we want to extract the files to a location other than the current directory, we can specify a target directory using the -C (specified directory) option. In this example, the user tried to extract the file titled “FILE” from filename.tar.gz.
This allows you to create bzip2-compressed files, often named .tar.bz2, .tar.bz, or .tbz files. To do so, just replace the -z for gzip in the commands here with a -j for bzip2. 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 second command reads the archive.tar file from the standard input and compresses it accordingly. Once you have an archive, you can extract it with the tar command. The following command will extract the contents of archive.tar.gz to the current directory.