Extract a compressed archive
Low risk
What do risk levels mean?
- Read-only
- Inspects state without changing anything.
- Low risk
- Reversible with a routine follow-up command.
- Medium risk
- Changes state; undo path documented.
- Destructive
- Deletes or overwrites; confirmation required.
Unpacks a tar.gz or zip archive into a target directory, first listing its contents so you know what will be written where.
filesarchiveextractunzip
Parameters
Path of the archive to extract (.tar.gz, .tgz, or .zip).
Directory to extract into.
Commands
Preview the archive's contents before extracting
tar -tzf "<archive>" | head -n 20Extract the archive into the destination directory
mkdir -p "." && tar -xzf "<archive>" -C "."Verification
ls "."The archive's top-level files and directories are present in the destination.
Undo
Remove the extracted entries, leaving the archive itself intact
tar -tzf "<archive>" | xargs -I {} rm -rf "./{}"Pitfalls
- Archives without a single top-level directory scatter files into the destination ("tar bomb") — the preview step shows this before it happens.
- Extraction overwrites existing files with the same names without asking.
- For .zip on macOS/Linux use unzip; tar -xzf only handles tar-based formats.