Linux How to extract a tar.gz file

In this tutorial, we will show you how to extract a tar.gz file :

tar vxf filename.tar.gz

Example

For example, apache-ant-1.9.4-bin.tar.gz in your ~/Download folder.

$ cd ~
$ pwd
/Users/mkyong
# Optionally, create a new folder for the archived file.
$ mkdir tools
$ cd tools
$ pwd
/Users/mkyong/tools
# Copy archived file to an above newly created folder.
$ cp ~/Downloads/apache-ant-1.9.4-bin.tar.gz ~/tools
# Extracts it
$ tar vxf apache-ant-1.9.4-bin.tar.gz
x apache-ant-1.9.4/bin/ant
x apache-ant-1.9.4/bin/antRun
x apache-ant-1.9.4/bin/antRun.pl
x apache-ant-1.9.4/bin/complete-ant-cmd.pl
x apache-ant-1.9.4/bin/runant.pl
x apache-ant-1.9.4/bin/runant.py
x apache-ant-1.9.4/
x apache-ant-1.9.4/bin/
......
$ pwd
/Users/mkyong/tools
$ ls -lsah
    0 drwxr-xr-x@ 15 mkyong  staff   510B Nov 22 11:24 apache-ant-1.9.4
10872 -rw-r-----@  1 mkyong  staff   5.3M Oct 29 14:42 apache-ant-1.9.4-bin.tar.gz

References

1. Linux : tar man page
2. 18 tar command examples