How To Extract and Unzip tar.gz Files for Linux & Windows

However, there are also many third-party tools you can install for a more user-friendly experience. Technical details aside, all you need to remember is that .zip files are more accessible but less space-efficient, while .tar files are less accessible but more space-efficient. As a result, one isn’t necessarily better than the other — it’s all a matter of application. 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. Tar has been supported since then on almost every platform outside of Windows.

How to Unzip or Extract tar.gz Files on Windows

While slightly different, they are quite lightweight and offer a much simpler alternative to using the command line. If you want to keep the original file after compression, there are two options. The first is the -k option, and the other uses the -c option to output the compressed file to a different file, preserving the original. You can easily unzip the resulting .tar.gz file with the decompress (-d) option. 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.

What About Opening Tar.gz Files on Windows?

To access the Windows command line, search for “command prompt” or “cmd” in the search bar. Right-click the first result and select the “Run as administrator” option. You may also be interested in learning about the best WinZip alternatives to compress files. Gzip compression reduces the overall file size, which makes it more efficient for distribution, backup, and storage purposes. It just bundles files & directories together while preserving their file structure and metadata. This means it takes all the specified files and puts them together into one container.

Another common reasons the bitcoin price could continue to grow cause of errors is case sensitivity, where Linux treats “FILE” and “file” as two separate entities. This error occurs when trying to extract specific files or directories from a .tar.gz file using tar. 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.

1. While every tar.gz file is a .tar archive, not every .gz is a .tar file.
2. It contains one or more compressed files and is commonly used on Unix operating systems to package files, programs, and installers.
3. Tar has been supported since then on almost every platform outside of Windows.
4. Tar.gz has become the standard format used for distributing Linux and open source software since it’s easy to extract on basically any platform that isn’t Windows.

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. And now you can use the 7-Zip File Manager to open, view, or extract files from tar.gz and other archives. If you want a specific file, you can drill down into the folder, or you can simply click the «Extract» button and choose a location to put all the files. 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.

Compressing and extracting these files, however, isn’t always intuitive. This article provides detailed guides to unzip .tar.gz files in Linux and Windows, as well as a few helpful tips and tricks. You can notice in the above image that the archive files are extracted in the same working directory. This compression is lossless – that means no data is lost during the compression process, and the original files can be fully restored upon extraction.

Mac (Finder)

However, there are some pretty major differences when it comes to accessing data within the files and the compression efficiency. On the other hand, Windows users can rely on third-party file archiver tools like 7-zip or WinRAR to effortlessly extract files. In Linux, users have multiple ways to extract .tar.gz files – through the terminal and graphical file archivers. TAR was developed for Unix as early as 1979 and GZ later in 1992. Being a native file format, it’s highly compatible and easy to use on those operating systems.

Our goal is 100% accuracy and we only publish information about file types that we have verified. Alternatively, select Extract files to pick where to extract the files. For a more GUI-friendly approach to extracting .tar.gz files, use 7-Zip. It usually doesn’t come preinstalled in older Windows systems. However, newer versions (starting from Windows 10) have it preinstalled.

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A Tar file is an archive that consists of multiple files put into one, while GZ is a compressed file format. Thus, combining TAR and GZ into a TAR.GZ provides you with a compressed bitcoins market cap crosses $1 trillion as etfs start trading archive. A user-friendly way to extract files from a .tar.gz archive is via a Graphical User Interface (GUI).

You can easily extract .tar.gz files using third-party tools like 7 zip and Winrar on the Windows system. When the archive is extracted, these attributes are restored. That means they maintain their original characteristics. This format is common in the Unix/Linux world and is widely used to create compressed archives.

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. Instead of downloading a specific application to your computer or leveraging its built-in abilities, you different types of bitcoin wallets that you need to know about can extract your tar.gz archive using an online app. Many websites allow you to extract all kinds of compressed files, including ZIP and TAR files. In short, a TAR file creates one archive file out of multiple files without compressing them, while the GZ file format compresses a file without creating an archive. Combined into the tar GZ file extension, you can archive and compress multiple files into one.

But it does not compress the data, which results in a larger file size compared to compressed formats. Here you should replace the filename with the actual name of the file in question. You also need to be in the directory containing the tar.gz file, like with most terminal commands in Linux. It is useful to note that tar doesn’t compress the files in question, only packages them. Indeed, sometimes the resulting tarball can be of greater size due to padding. The FileInfo.com team has independently researched the Compressed Tarball file format and Mac, Windows, Linux, and Android apps listed on this page.