How do I open a tgz file?

You need the free Stuffit Expander (just sign up here)...

This functionality really should come with OSX

I thought OS X could open .tgz's... or have I always had stuffit installed?

Download the Unarchiver, its free, and better than Stuffit. Or you could use the gunzip command in the terminal and then the tar command, if youre proficient with the command line.

Blubbert said:

Download the Unarchiver, its free, and better than Stuffit. Or you could use the gunzip command in the terminal and then the tar command, if youre proficient with the command line.

Click to expand...

The Unarchiver is much more prone to failing, especially with password protected files.

Bah, why wasn't this the FIRST reply to this thread? Mac OS X is based on UNIX, ever UNIX-like system comes with the "tar" command. tgz is short for tar.gz, a gzipped tarball, the main compression format on Unix systems other than Mac OS X.

Open the Terminal in /Applications/Utilities, "tar -xzf <file>" will do it. The x option says eXtract(as opposed to making a new tar), z says pass it to the "gzip" command first, f says to Force it(many stupid problems that don't mean anything practical are avoided with this).

If you ever encounter a tar.bz2 or tbz/tbz2 file, you would just replace z with j(they ran out of letters), which passes it to bzip2 instead of gzip.

kavi said:

so all I do is open terminal and type:

tar -xzf filename.tgz

I've tried that and I can't say it worked...

Click to expand...

Well, ok, you need to be in the directory that the file is in. Or you need to type the full filepath.

CD <relative directory OR absolute path changes you to that directory, and then all commands will executive relative to your location unless an absolute path is specified. But you can always specify an absolute path.

Example: if the file is in your home folder..

tar -xzf /Users/(username)/file.tgz

or
cd /Users/(username)
then
tar -xzf file.tgz

or

cd /Users
cd (username)
tar -xzf file.tgz

Hopefully you get the picture, there are an infinite number of ways to do this.

Kavi It Would Already be Extracted If You Had Used Stuffit Expander

kavi said:

stuffit didn't work, it gave me some kind of error message.

Click to expand...

alright, this is different...

Try renaming it to (file).tar.gz instead of (file).tgz. That might be throwing it off. Otherwise the file may be screwed up, in which case I don't know.

Try this

tar -xvzf file.tgz

if that doesn't work, then do it one at a time.

unzip file.tgz
then
tar -xvf file.tar

"The Unarchiver" from the app store worked well for me. Thanks

To extract :
tar xzf file.tgz