In Linux, a common file format is the tarball. A tarball is a compressed folder similar to a zip file. Most Linux distributions include a graphical archive manager that allows the user to extract and manage different types of archives. While GUI based packages are great, I prefer using the terminal to manipulate files. A common task I perform is extracting files from a tarball. I always have to lookup the command needed to extract different types of tarballs. This blog post is meant to be a quick reference for myself and also to get the commands to stick in my brain.
For tar.gz(or .tgz) files
These files are compressed using gZip compressor.
$ tar zxvf file.tar.gz
The options:
z: The z option tells the tar command to uncompress the file.
x: This tells tar to extract the files.
v: v stands for “verbose”. v will list all the extracted files.
f: The f option tells tar which file you want to extract.
For tar.bz2(or tbz) files
tarbz2 files are compressed using the bZip2 compressor.
Use the following command:
$ tar jxvf file.tar.tbz
As you can see, the two commands are very similar, the only difference is that in this case, we use a ‘j’ option as opposed to using ‘z’.
j: Decompresses a bzip2 file.
A simpler way
While writing this blog post, I came across a utility called dtrx(which stands for “Do The Right Extraction”) that makes extracting archives simple, regardless of the compressor used. To extract an archive, do the following:
$ dtrx file.tar.gz
$ dtrx file.tar.bz2
To install dtrx run
$ sudo apt-get install dtrx