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Jorge Castro
Asked: 2012-01-03 15:41:17 +0800 CST

How do I uncompress a tarball that uses .xz?

  • 772

I'm used to extracting tarballs with a -xfz flag, which handles gzip and bzip2 archives.

Recently I've run into a .tar.xz file and I would like to uncompress it in one step using tar, how can I do that?

tar

12 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Ubuntu includes GNU tar, which recognizes the format by itself! One command works with any supported compression method, per the manual.

    tar xf archive.tar.xz
tar xf archive.tar.gz
tar xf archive.tar

    etc. If tar gives a Cannot exec error, you may need to sudo apt install xz-utils first.

    • 1194

  2. Try

    tar -xJf file.pkg.tar.xz

    The -J is the flag that specifically deals with .xz files.

    • 379

  3. If for some reason the tar solutions don’t work (perhaps because you’re using the OS X built-ins), try this:

    unxz < file.tar.xz > file.tar

    …which is equivalent to:

    xz -dc < file.tar.xz > file.tar

    Then use tar to untar the file.

    • 90

  4. xz is a lossless data compressor. You will have to extract the tar ball from xz and then extract the tar:

    unxz my_archive.tar.xz      # results in my_archive.tar

    Then you know to extract a tar

    tar -xf my_archive.tar

    Source: XZ Utils - Wikipedia.

    • 39

  5. I had the same problem, the tar xf command was not able to extract it. To fix this, you need to install the xz-utils package. The solution was:

    sudo apt-get install xz-utils

    then:

    tar xf myfile.tar.xz
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  6. tar -xvf package.tar.xz

    -x - extract files

    -v - verbosely list files processed

    -f - use specified archive file

    • 20

  7. Just want to add that if you have an old version of GNU tar prior to version 1.22 when the --xz and -J options became available, you could compress or decompress tar.xz files by using --use-compress-program xz. For example,

    tar --use-compress-program xz -cf example.tar.xz file1 file2 file3

    or

    tar --use-compress-program xz -xf example.tar.xz
    • 6

  8. If tar recognizes the compression format, you don't need a flag:

    tar xvf *.tar.xz

    If you need to decompress the input manually, for example because your tar is too old to recognize xz, or you need a special path:

    xz -cd *.tar.xz | tar xvf -

    Pipes are faster than making an uncompressed intermediate file, and use less disk space too!

    • 5

  9. Wow, that's a really good one. Was it done with 7zip on a Mac? Try this:

    7z x -so file.tar.xz | tar xf -
    • 4

  10. I like dtrx

    sudo apt install dtrx
dtrx your-file.tar.xz
    • 4