How To Open .Tar.gz Files
First, a couple words about .tar files. TAR is a really old file extension. It harkens back to the good old times when hard disks were an expensive rarity and tapes ruled over the field of backup and storage. In fact, “TAR” means tape archive. However, despite it’s telling name, it probably woun’t be considered a “real” archiving format by many contemporary users, as it offers no data compression. A .tar file is, in essence, just a bunch of other files concatenated together.
Since a TAR file offers no compression features of it’s own, the files are typically compresed with an additional archiver. Common examples include Gzip (extension .tar.gz) and Bzip2 (file extension .tar.bz2). This means that sometimes you might need several applications to extract a .tar file - for example, a rar converter might come in handy.
Lets get down to business. To unzip a “plain” TAR archive on a Unix-based OS, use this command : “tar -xvf filename.tar”. This will unzip the contents of the archive 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 popular archivers know how to deal with .tar files. For example, WinRAR (shareware) and 7-zip (freeware) can both open .tar, .tar.gz, and several other archive formats easily. With WinRAR unzipping a .tar archive is as easy as right-click + the “Extract here” menu option.
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.