How do I open a TGZ file?

[sgoodman]

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

[Zath]

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]

7-zip is a good open source tool for this.

7-Zip

[nickh]

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]

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]

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.