How to work with compressed files on Microsoft Windows

There are certain compressed file types that you could come into when working on your website, such tar.gz and tar.bz2 files. For instance, log files that have been archived are kept in the gzip (.gz) format. The operating system on your computer may prevent you from reading these files. Examples of operating systems that handle these kinds of compressed files are Linux and Mac OS X, but not Microsoft Windows.

This article is intended for Microsoft Windows users who need to be able to open and work with Linux-based compressed files.Table of Contents

• Linux-based compressed files
• Using 7-Zip

Linux-based compressed files

Hostvento Hosting servers run on the Linux operating system, and Linux supports several different formats for compressed files. Whereas Microsoft Windows uses .zip and .rar extensions for compressed files, Linux mainly uses .gz and .bz2. Additionally, these compressed files may contain multiple files in a tarball, which uses the .tar extension. For example, it is common to see a filename that ends in .tar.gz, which is a tarball file compressed using the gzip format.

Linux and Mac OS X operating systems already support these kinds of files. For instance, double-clicking a.gz file in the Finder window will decompress it on Mac OS X. Similar to this, working with these kinds of files is supported by the majority of Linux desktop environments, or you may use the command line.

If your computer runs Microsoft Windows, however, you must install an application that can process these types of files. WinZip and WinRAR are commercially available applications that can handle these files. This article describes how to use 7-Zip, a free and open source program for Microsoft Windows that can process many types of compressed files.

Using 7-Zip

To get started with 7-Zip, go to http://www.7-zip.org, download the installation program, and run it. After you install 7-Zip, you are ready to decompress and extract files.

To decompress and extract files using 7-Zip:

1. Locate the file that you want to extract.
2. Right-click the file, click 7-Zip, and then click Extract Here. The extracted file or files appear in the folder. Alternatively, to extract the files to a different folder, right-click the file, click 7-Zip, and then click Extract files. You can choose the specific folder for the extracted files.If you just want to see what the file contains without actually extracting anything, right-click the file, click 7-Zip, and then click Open archive.
3. If you are working with a compressed tarball file (that is, a file that has a .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 extension), you must now extract the files from the .tar file, because the previous step only decompresses the compressed file. For example, if you start with an example.tar.gz file, step 2 decompresses the file, and now you have an example.tar file. To extract the files from the tarball, right-click the .tar file, click 7-Zip, and then click Extract Here.