Extract a gzip compressed tar archive in Linux

The version of tar in most Linux distributions supports gzip compression. This means that a gzipped tar file can be extracted in one simple command.


To extract the archive filename.tar.gz into the current directory:

tar xzf filename.tar.gz

If this fails, the version of tar may not support gzip compression. In this case, you can use the traditional two-stage command:

gzip -dc filename.tar.gz | tar xf -

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