targz

Targz is a gzip-compressed tar archive, commonly written as tar.gz or .tgz. It combines the tar format, which concatenates multiple files into a single archive while preserving metadata such as permissions, ownership, and timestamps, with gzip compression to reduce the archive’s size. The result is a single file that is convenient for distribution, backup, and packaging on many systems.

The tar format itself is an archiving format, not a compression format. When tar is used in conjunction with gzip, the archive created is a tarball that is compressed with gzip. The .tar.gz or .tgz extension signals that the file is both a tar archive and gzip-compressed. The term targz is sometimes used informally to refer to such a file.

Creation and extraction are typically done with tar. Common commands include tar czf archive.tar.gz /path/to/files to create and tar xzf archive.tar.gz to extract. Many tar implementations support these options in a single command, and tar can also use other compressors via the --use-compress-program option.

Targz files are widely used on Unix-like systems for distributing source code and software packages, backups, and data archives. They are supported across major platforms, including Linux and macOS, with Windows tools such as 7-zip or WinRAR able to create and extract them.

Alternatives include tar.bz2 and tar.xz, which use different compression algorithms, and the non-archived zip format. While targz offers good compression and preserves file metadata, it does not provide random access within the archive; extracting requires decompressing the archive. Security considerations include verifying sources and checksums to guard against tampered downloads.