How to extract a tar.gz file

So you have went to that website and downloaded the latest version of your files. But they are in a tar.gz format, How do you extract them to your site.

First what is a tar.gz file, this just means that the tar has been compressed.

Say you want to extract the tar you just download called lastest.tar.gz from wordpress.

tar -zxvf latest.tar.gz

• -z : Uncompress the resulting archive with gzip command
• -x : Extract to disk from archive
• -v : Verbose..aka show you what its doing
• -f : Read the archive from the called latest.tar.gz

By default this will get extracted into your current directory

What if you want it moved to your html directory

tar -zxvf latest.tar.gz -C /var/www/html

What if you just want to view the files in the tar.gz but don't want to extract them yet

tar -tzvf latest.tar.gz

• -t : List the contents of the archive