UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Oh yes!!!! It works!!!! Thanks so much era. Thanks so much everybody!!!!

On my system, tar won't open zipped tar files.

Yes, Vi-Curious. I can't open zipped tar files as well. That potentially is a problem because I sometimes also want to extract zip files as well. Is there any option so that we can unzip the zip files also, including the tgz files?

I don't understand. I thought you said that era's solution worked??? The file extension tgz is supposed to be a zipped tar file. So how do you say his solution worked and then say you can't open zipped tar files?

Hi Vi-Curious. Sorry, what I meant it does not work for files like Files.tgz.zip. I thought that was what you meant when you said "zipped tar files". In this case, the command does not work. It works fine for .tgz files.
Sorry for the confusion.

So, what errors do you get when you run the below command?
tar -xvf File.tgz `tar -tf File.tgz | grep 'Apple'`


Thanks.

That's slightly inexact. tar by itself simply collects stuff into a container; usually, this file has an extension .tar and very often, you then compress ("zip") it using gzip or bzip2. This is different from the Windows program zip/unzip which does both jobs (collecting into a container, and compressing). A gzipped tar file gets an extension of .tar.gz or .tgz (for legacy DOS compatibility) and a bzipped tar file usually gets .tar.bz2. There was also a legacy utility compress which had the extension .Z and those were mapped into .taz for DOS compatibility, but you don't see it used much these days, as the compression rate is unimpressive by today's standards.

(Of course, the extension could basically be anything or nothing, but these are the usual conventions.)

Some modern tar programs have options to do compression and decompression on the fly; in GNU tar, the z flag selects gzip compression and decompression, and the j flag selects bzip2.