How to untar tar.gz archives on Linux systems, there is no actual Linux untar command – you use the tar command with different options to extract tar.gz files.
tar.gz files are commonly used on Linux operating systems for source packages and for grouping large amounts of small files, tar.gz is by far the most common compressed archive software used on Linux, if you are from a Windows background you will be familiar with .zip this is a similar propitiatory equivalent.
How to untar tar.gz archive
tar -xvzf archive.tar.gz
You should be left with your extracted files in a directory or in the directory where you extracted your tar.gz file.
I will explain the Linux untar options I used above:
x = Extract
v = Verbose (it shows you what files are extracted from the archive on the console)
z = Filter through gzip – allows us to extract gzip compression using the Linux tar command.
f = File, this tells the command we which to use a file
