Gordaen’s Blog

Windows generally sucks at guessing how long it will take to move a file, but today I was extracting the files in a .GZ and OSX told me I would be waiting over 2 billion hours. Fortunately, it was apparently confusing “billion hours” with “seconds” so all is well.

I’ve noticed a number of people searching for “gzip extraction” and landing here. I assume those people are actually looking for information on how to extract a gzipped file. If the file is a gzipped tarball (i.e., ends in “.tar.gz”) and you’re using Linux, you can generally use tar xvzf filename.tar.gz to extract the files into a folder. The letters are X for extract, V for verbose, Z for gzip, and F for file. If you use gunzip filename.gz, you will extract the file and delete the gzipped version. Hope that helps someone.