When using Unix or Linux, it is easy to forget the magic incantations needed to do something. In the spirit of sharing information and making it widely available, this article documents how to uncompress Unix files that end in particular suffixes. This list will be updated on a regular basis when I encounter different compressed formats.
For files that end in…
- name.tar.gz
- invoke tar xvfz name.tar.gz
- name.tgz
- invoke tar -zxvf name.tgz
- name.tar.bz2
- invoke bunzip2 name.tar.bz2 | tar x -f
- name.zip
- invoke unzip name.zip
- Note: gunzip won’t work on files that have a .zip suffix.
- name.gz
- invoke gzip -d name.gz
If there are other tar-like or other compress/uncompress commands that you know about, please let me know.
