Extract a file from a tar file

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Podcast Making Agile work for data science. Stack Gives Back Featured on Meta. New post summary designs on greatest hits now, everywhere else eventually. Linked 0. Related 7. Hot Network Questions. Question feed. Accept all cookies Customize settings. For more tar command examples, see my Linux tar command examples and tutorial. How to un-tar extract one file from a tar archive. By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: January 9, A "tar extract multiple" tip - How to extract multiple files from a tar archive.

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Find Your Lost Product Keys. Clean Install Windows 10 the Easy Way. The Best Tech Newsletter Anywhere Join , subscribers and get a daily digest of news, geek trivia, and our feature articles. How-To Geek is where you turn when you want experts to explain technology. Since we launched in , our articles have been read more than 1 billion times. To help you out, we'll cover some basics about what exactly extracting a TAR file entails and then go through step-by-step instructions on how to do it yourself using tools such as the WinZip.

A TAR file is a computer archive that is created with the Unix command tar. The most common use for this type of file is to compress and combine many files together, which ultimately saves space on your hard drive. Compression also makes it easier to transport files across the internet. As mentioned, a TAR file may contain any number of different types of files, such as text documents, images, videos, etc. These archives can then be uncompressed by using the same tool used to create them tar or an application like WinZip or 7-Zip.

The Tar format has been around since , when it was created by Jay Fenlason. He was looking for a way to bundle UNIX software together on tapes so they could be archived, efficiently shared with others without any loss of quality.