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How Do I Unzip, Unrar, Untar, etc.?

Large collections of files will often be compressed in order to make them more friendly for transfer or long-term storage. Below are examples on how to uncompress a few common compression file types on the Yens.

.zip

Perhaps one of the more common compression types, you can simply use unzip:

unzip bigfile.zip

Additional options for this command can be found here.

.tar

Another common compression format, especially from Linux-based systems, you can use the tar command:

tar -xvf bigfile.tar

Additional options for this command and an explanation of the flags can be found here.

.gz

This compression format is created by a GNU zip compression algorithm. You can use gunzip:

gunzip bigfile.csv.gz

Additional options for this command can be found here.

.tar.gz and .tgz

Much larger files can often be found to be compressed in this format. You can use tar again:

tar -xvzf bigfile.tar.gz

The extra -z flag here tells the command to also decompress the .gz compression on the file.

.rar

For RAR files, you can just use unrar:

unrar e bigfile.rar

Additional explanation for this can be found here.

.7z

A less common compression format, you can use 7z for this:

7z e bigfile.7z

Additional options for this command can be found here.