This tutorial will show you how to zip up a folder as a tar.gz then extract the contents of a tar.gz. First start by going to the directory that contains the file that you want to compress. For demonstration purposes I will create a new folder and zip it up. Then delete the folder and unzip it to show the process working.

Step 1

To make this tutorial easier you should cd to the directory that contains the folder that you want to zip. e.g cd /tmp

To compress the folder we will use the tar command. You will then provide the name that you want to use for the archived file/folder and the name of the file/folder you want to archive.

tar -pczf zippedarchive.tar.gz zipme

Step 2

Use ls to check that the process was successful. You should see your newly created archive listed on the screen. You have successfully created a tar.gz archive! Now let us unzip it.

Step 3

Start by removing the old directory that we just zipped up.In this case I want to delete the directory called delete zipme. Use rmdir /zipme to delete the directory and use ls to check that is has successfully been deleted. Now you can extract the archive.
To Extract a tar.gz archive you can use the tar command again.

[root tmp]# tar xvsf zippedarchive.tar.gz

Use ls to check that the directory was successfully extracted. Below is the full process of creating a directory, archiving it, then extracting it with validation steps in between.

[root tmp]# mkdir zipme
[root tmp]# ls
zipme
[root tmp]# tar -pczf zippedarchive.tar.gz zipme
[root tmp]# ls
zipme zippedarchive.tar.gz
[root tmp]# rmdir zipme
[root tmp]# ls
zippedarchive.tar.gz
[root tmp]# tar xvsf zippedarchive.tar.gz
zipme/
[root tmp]# ls
zipme zippedarchive.tar.gz