How To Unzip Linux Archive Files
Let me say some words about TAR archives. .tar is a really old file extension. It harkens back to the good old times when hard drives were a pricy oddity and tapes ruled over the field of backup and storage. In fact, “TAR” is an acronym for tape archive. However, despite it’s suggestive acronym, it probably woun’t be called a “real” archiving format by most modern users because it offers no data compression. A .tar file is basically just a bunch of different files concatenated together.
Since a TAR file offers no data compresion functionality of it’s own, the files are typically compresed with an external archiver. Common examples include Gzip (produces .tar.gz) and Bzip2 (file extension .tar.bz2). This means that usually you might need more than one program to open a .tar file – e.g., a rar converter is rarely needed, but sometimes required.
Lets get down to business. To extract a normal TAR archive on a Unix-based OS, use this command line : “tar -xvf filename.tar”. This will extract the contents of the file in the current directory. In case the archive has been compressed with gzip (.tar.gz), you need to add the “z” flag to the aforementioned command; like this : “tar -xzvf filename.tar.gz”.
If you’re using Windows, fear not – most semi-decent archivers know how to deal with .tar files. For example, WinRAR (commercial) and 7-zip (freeware) can both unzip .tar, .tar.gz, and several other file formats easily. With WinRAR extracting a .tar archive is as easy as right-click followed by “Extract here”.
The techniques explained in this article should be enough to deal with most .tar archives you’ll ever come across. If you encounter something that wasn’t addressed here, there’s always Google, ready to answer every query.
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