Linux – Fastest way to extract tar.gz

gziplinuxtar

Is there anyway to extract a tar.gz file faster than tar -zxvf filenamehere?

We have large files, and trying to optimize the operation.

Best Answer

pigz is a parallel version of gzip. Although it only uses a single thread for decompression, it starts 3 additional threads for reading, writing, and check calculation. Your results may vary but we have seen significant improvement in decompression of some of our datasets. Once you install pigz, the tar file can be extracted with:

pigz -dc target.tar.gz | tar xf -

Related Solutions

Linux – How to extract from this tar file when the file may be corrupt

You could try your extract with the -i option to ignore zeros:

The --ignore-zeros (-i) option causes tar to ignore blocks of zeros in
the archive. Normally a block of zeros indicates the end of the archive,
but when reading a damaged archive, or one which was created by cat-ing
several archives together, this option allows tar to read the entire
archive. This option is not on by default because many versions of tar
write garbage after the zeroed blocks.

TAR command to extract a single file from a .tar.gz

If you're risking overwriting files in production with uncertain results, you're doing something wrong. Test first.

tar zxvf archive.tar.gz path/to/file/in/archive -C /destination/dir

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – How to extract from this tar file when the file may be corrupt

TAR command to extract a single file from a .tar.gz

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