View Full Version : How do I open a TGZ file?
sgoodman
2009-10-21, 04:20 AM
Greetings,
I just downloaded a TGZ file, but Windows Vista won't open it. Do I have to download an extractor program? Does anyone have any recommendations?
Thanks,
Shane.
Windows Vista Home Premium
Greetings,
I just downloaded a TGZ file, but Windows Vista won't open it. Do I have to download an extractor program? Does anyone have any recommendations?
Thanks,
Shane.
Windows Vista Home Premium
Have a trawl around this site.
It's an older compression format.
jeremya
2009-10-21, 09:04 AM
7-zip is a good open source tool for this.
7-Zip (http://www.7-zip.org/)
nickh
2009-10-21, 09:34 AM
I'll second the recommendation for 7-zip on Windows.
.tgz a shorter form of .tar.gz , and is actually the result of 2 processes: archiving (tar) and compression (gz).
"gz" is short for "GZip", which is a fast compression algorithm that is extremely widely used.
"tar" is a file format for archiving: it rolls multiple files into a single file, but doesn't compress the files. That's why .tar.gz / .tgz files are quite common: tar is useful for combining many files into one, and gzip is useful for compressing them.
sgoodman
2009-11-06, 03:37 AM
I've downloaded 7-Zip and it's worked well.
The last time I've had to use an extractor, I bought WinZip, but I wasn't in the mood to spend $30 for something I would only use once.
Thanks,
Shane.
nickh
2009-11-06, 10:00 AM
Yeah, WinZip's an old and crusty product. Considering all of the free and open-source alternatives that are available, I don't know how WinZip is still in business.
I also don't understand why Windows doesn't natively support common compression or archive formats such as tar, gzip, bzip, rar, etc. What a failure on Microsoft's part.