dumb newbie question about unzipping downloaded files

[Mighty JD]

I am running SuSE 7.2 and I have downloaded several programs (i.e. wordpefect, etc.) and I cannot properly extract the files to install the program. They have the .tar.gz extension. Every time I try to do this I get cannot find file or folder. What is the quick and easy command to extract these files. Thanks!

[ph34r]

tar xzf filename.tar.gz

It should (if packaged properly) extract into a folder with the filename (minus the .tar.gz part).

[Mighty JD]

Thanks, I'll try that out. I was trying
(gzip tar -xvf filename.tar.gz) and that didn't work!

[Craig McPherson]

Tar only packs multiple files into a single large file.

Gzip only compresses a single file into a smaller file.

You can have tar filter a file through gzip and then untar it, like this:

tar zxvf filename.tar.gz

That's not very UNIXy, though. If you want to be wizardly, you'd use pipes:

gunzip filename.tar.gz | tar xv

Or if you want to be even more UNIXy:

cat filename.tar.gz | gunzip | tar xv