What do I type into the terminal to tell it where to go? I don't really understand how to move files using the terminal.
3 Answers
The question is where to extract application files, so I'd recommend to extract it to a temporary folder inside
/home
directory and then copy it into a permanent location in the file system.
For deb
files
Method 1: using dpkg
deb is the extension of the Debian software package format and the most often used name for such binary packages.
dpkg is the package manager for Debian. So using dpkg command you can list and extract deb packages.
Use
dpkg -c
to list the contents of a deb package:$ dpkg -c <file-name>.deb
Use
dpkg -x
to extract the files from a deb package:$ dpkg -x <file-name>.deb </path/to/temp-dir>
Method 2: using ar
Debian packages are standard Unix ar archives that include two tar archives optionally compressed with gzip (zlib), Bzip2, lzma, or xz (lzma2): one archive holds the control information and another contains the program data.
Therefore .deb
files always contains three files — debian-binary
, control.tar.gz
, and data.tar.gz
.
Use ar
and tar
command to extract and view the files from the deb package.
To extract the contents of
.deb
archive to your/home
directory:$ ar -vx <file-name>.deb x - debian-binary x - control.tar.gz x - data.tar.gz
To extract the contents of
data.tar.gz
file:$ tar -xvzf data.tar.gz </path/to/temp-dir>
To extract the files into the root directory tree, which should place everything where it should go, you can:
$ tar -xvzf data.tar.gz /
Note:
deb
files should be installed with dpkg, so to install the package, do:
sudo dpkg -i <file-name>.deb
If the deb
file(s) are in another directory inside your /home
directory, you can install it by:
cd <directory>
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
For Tar files
TAR(tape archive) is a file format (in the form of a type of archive bitstream) for archiving files.
To extract a tar file:
tar -xvf file.tar
To extract a .tar.gz (gzip) file, (note -z option):
tar -xzvf file.tar.gz
To extract .tar.bz2 (bzip2) file, (note -j option):
tar -xjvf file.tar.bz2
By default files will be extracted into the current directory. To change the directory use -C
option.
For example, to extract to /home/data
:
tar -zxvf data.tar.gz -C /home/data
To view a detailed table of contents (list all files) for this archive:
tar -tzvf data.tar.gz
Using a GUI tool: Archive Manager
You can use the Archive Manager GUI application to create, view, modify, or extract an archive.
Press the Super key to Open the Dash and type Archive Manager. This will launch the Archive Manager window.
Click on Open and browse for the tar or deb file.
Click on Extract and select the directory to where you want to extract the file.
Not to minimize other excellent answers, I wanted to provide a very simple answer.
If the file ends with .tar.gz
(or .tgz
), move the file to the directory to which you want to extract it and cd
to that directory. Then:
tar xzvf filename.tar.gz
If the filename ends with .tar.bz2
or .tbz
, then change the z
in the above command to a j
.
Which directory?
Any directory you like. I normally use /tmp
because everything there is automatically deleted on reboot. If the program is designed to be run directly after extracting it without running an installer, then the traditional location would be ~/bin
.
It depends what the application is. If it's a .deb
file, you can say:
sudo dpkg -i filename.deb
If it's a .tar.gz
file, you can say:
tar zvxf filename.tar.gz
cd directory-name
make
make install
# (or ./install or similar)
-
Thanks, its a tar.gz file. now how do i extract using the terminal? right now the file is in my downloads folder– ConstNov 4, 2012 at 2:11