Untar and Uncompress Files

-zxvf

To create a .tar.gz file, you used a set of options: -zcvf. To untar and uncompress the resulting file, you only make one substitution: -x (or --extract) for -c (or --create).

$ ls -l rsgranne rsgranne 846049 moby.tar.gz $ tar -zxvf moby.tar.gz moby-dick/ moby-dick/job.txt moby-dick/bible/ moby-dick/bible/genesis.txt moby-dick/bible/job.txt moby-dick/moby-dick.txt moby-dick/paradise_lost.txt $ ls -l rsgranne rsgranne    168 moby-dick rsgranne rsgranne 846049 moby.tar.gz 

Make sure you always test the file before you open it, as covered in the previous section, "Test Files That Will Be Untarred and Uncompressed." That means the order of commands you should run will look like this:

$ tar -zvtf moby.tar.gz $ tar -zxvf moby.tar.gz 

Note

If you're opening a tarball that was compressed using bzip2, just use this command instead:

$ tar -jxvf moby.tar.bz2