How To Expand Linux Archive Files
admin
First, some words about .tar files. TAR is a truly old file extension. It harkens back to the good old times when hard drives were an expensive rarity and tapes ruled over the field of long-term data storage. In fact, “TAR” is an acronym for tape archive. On the other hand, despite it’s telling acronym, it would hardly be considered a “real” archiving format by most modern users because it offers no data compression. A .tar file is basically just a number of other files strung together.
Since a TAR file offers no data compresion features by itself, the files are usually compresed with an additional archiver. Common examples include Gzip (produces .tar.gz) and Bzip2 (file extension .tar.bz2). So usually you might need several applications to uzip a .tar file – for example, a rar converter might prove of use.
Lets get down to the important question. To unzip a “plain” TAR archive on a Linux-like system, use this command : “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 can deal with .tar files. For example, WinRAR (shareware) and 7-zip (open source) can both open .tar, .tar.gz, and several other file formats easily. With WinRAR unzipping a TAR file is as easy as right-click + “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.