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Unpacking a tarball

Unpacking a tarball is straightforward and is achieved using the tar command. Typically tarballs will be compressed with either GZip (tar.gz) or BZip (tar.bz2) and can be decompressed into the current directory by using the matching tar command arguments.

For GZip compression the format of this command is:

[user@node004 [stanage] tarpackages]$ tar -xzf mytarball.tar.gz

For BZip compression the format of this command is:

[user@node004 [stanage] tarpackages]$ tar -xjf mytarball.tar.bz2

No example of this process is shown as the commands do not have terminal output unless there is an error.