I received a huge .tar.gz file from a client that contains about 800 mb of image files (when uncompressed.) Our hosting company's ftp is seriously slow, so extracting all the files locally and sending them up via ftp isn't practical. I was able to ftp the .tar.gz file to our hosting site, but when I ssh into my directory and try using unzip, it gives me this error:
[esthers@clients locations]$ unzip community_images.tar.gz
Archive: community_images.tar.gz
End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive. In the latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on the last disk(s) of this archive.
note: community_images.tar.gz may be a plain executable, not an archive
unzip: cannot find zipfile directory in one of community_images.tar.gz or community_images.tar.gz.zip, and cannot find community_images.tar.gz.ZIP, period.
What command do I need to use to extract all the files in a .tar.gz file?
Best Answer
Type
man tar
for more information, but this command should do the trick:Also, to extract in a specific directory
for eg. to extract the archive into a custom
my_images
directory .To explain a little further,
tar
collected all the files into one package,community_images.tar
. The gzip program applied compression, hence thegz
extension. So the command does a couple things:f
: this must be the last flag of the command, and the tar file must be immediately after. It tells tar the name and path of the compressed file.z
: tells tar to decompress the archive using gzipx
: tar can collect files or extract them.x
does the latter.v
: makes tar talk a lot. Verbose output shows you all the files being extracted.C
: means change to directoryDIR
. In our example,DIR
ismy_images
.