Unpacking files is one of the basic things that any operating system out there can do. Everyone has their own way of doing it and Linux is no different. While you might think that unzipping files in Linux might require you to have a degree in rocket science, you'd be wrong and while you can unzip files from the command line, there are tons of GUI apps that can also unzip files using ease. So, in this article, let's look at how to extract or remove ZIP or TAR files on Linux.
Linux Tutorial for Beginners – 10 – Compress and extract tar and gz files
Before we dig in, it is important to understand Tar and its types and how they are used in different scenarios for bundling and zipping files in Linux. Tar stands for Tape Archive and the difference between same and Zip files is that Tar bundles files without compressing them while Zip files are usually compressed. Here are different types of Tar files:
Note that "no compression" only applies to files ending in ".tar" Compression methods such as Gzip and Unix compression add an additional extension to the Tar file such as "tar.gz" and "tar.xz" respectively. There are other compression methods as well, but the ones mentioned are the most popular.
One of the easiest ways to extract files ending with the extension "Tar" is to use the tar command. Here is a sample command that shows how to use tar to remove a Tar archive on Linux.
