How To: How to Extract .tar.gz in Linux

If you are newbie in Linux, you will confuse when you want to install Linux application and it's format file is .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 (tarball). But now you don't need to worry because this post will give you the answer :).

Standard format to extract this tarball file is:

tar xvf filename.tar

If the tarball has also been gzipped (compressed), you can use the following command:

tar xvfz filename.tar.gz

If you only want certain directories from the tarball, do this:

tar xvzf filename.tar.gz */dir.you.want/*

If you have a .tar.bz2 file, then you need bzip2 installed (/usr/ports/archivers/bzip2), and you issue this command:

tar yxf filename.tar.bz2