.TGZ File Extension

Unix .TAR file archive compressed with Gnu Zip (.GZIP) compression; uses a TAR archive to bundle the files together and Gzip compression to reduce the file size; commonly used on Unix and Linux systems; originally created as the shorthand version of the compound extension .TAR.GZ.

To decompress a TGZ file and extract the archived files in one step at the Unix command line, type this command:

tar -xzvf filename.tgz

This command decompresses the Gzip file and then extracts the files from the TAR archive.

NOTE: TGZ files are used as install packages for some Linux distributions. Therefore, the ".tar.gz" extension is sometimes used for archives while the ".tgz" extension is used for installers.