A TGZ file is a Unix .TAR archive compressed with Gnu Zip (.GZIP) compression to reduce the file size. It is commonly used on Unix and Linux systems and was originally created as the shorthand version of the compound extension .TAR.GZ.

To decompress a TGZ file and extract the archived files in one step at the Unix command line, type this command: tar -xzvf filename.tgz This command decompresses the Gzip file and then extracts the files from the TAR archive. NOTE: TGZ files are used as install packages for some Linux distributions. Therefore, the ".tar.gz" extension is sometimes used for archives while the ".tgz" extension is used for installers.