.Dmg Vs .Tar.Gz Archive Files Onto

During his career, he has worked as a freelance programmer, manager of an international software development team, an IT services project manager, and, most recently, as a Data Protection Officer.

Youll encounter them frequently while using a Linux distribution like Ubuntu or even while using the terminal on macOS.

Heres how to extractor untarthe contents of a tar file, also known as a tarball.

A file with just a.tar extension is uncompressed, but those will be very rare.

.Dmg Vs .Tar.Gz Archive Files Onto

Tar files date all the way back to 1979 when the tar command was created to allow system administrators to archive files onto tape.

Forty years later we are still using the tar command to extract tar files on to our hard drives.

The tar command will work happily with both types of file, so it doesnt matter which compression method was usedand it should be available everywhere you have a Bash shell.

You just need to use the appropriate tar command line options.

One file is called ukulelesongs.tar.gz, the other is called guitarsongs.tar.bz2.

These files are in the Downloads directory.

Where did this directory come from It was contained in the tar file, and was extracted along with the files.

To do this well use almost exactly the same command as before but with one important difference.

The.bz2 extension suffix tells us it has been compressed using the bzip2 command.

Instead of using the -z (gzip) option, we will use the -j (bzip2) option.

If you need to create a directory and have tar extract the files into it all in one command, you can do that as follows.

You can review the contents of a tar file before you extract it by using the -t (list) option.

It is usually convenient to pipe the output through the less command.

We only need to add the -z option when were extracting files from a.tar.gz file.

Likewise, we dont need the -j option to list the files in a tar.bz2 file.

Note that the path is wrapped in quotation marks because there are spaces in the path.

The number represents how many levels of directories to ignore.

Files from the ignored directories are still extracted, but the directory structure is not replicated on your hard drive.

The files and directories that would have been extracted to that directory are extracted in the target directory.

So if we use --strip-components2, all the files are extracted in the target directory, and no other directories are created.

Thankfully, to allow us to extract files from.tar.gz and tar.bz2 files with a good degree of granular control, we only need to remember a handful of these options.

After over 30 years in the IT industry, he is now a full-time technology journalist.