What Is the GZ file and How to Open It on Different Platforms? [MiniTool Wiki]
What Is GZ File?
What is a GZ file? A GZ file is an archive file compressed by the standard GNU zip (gzip) compression algorithm. It usually contains a single compressed file, but can also store multiple compressed files. Gzip is primarily used for file compression on Linux operating systems.
Users can select a file or folder, or even a group of files and folders, and compress it into a GZ file. It is even possible to compress multiple GZ files into one GZ file, or put these GZ files in a folder and then compress them into one GZ file.
GZ files typically store .TAR archives that contain multiple files, such as video, image, audio, and backup files. TAR files compressed with gzip usually have a .tar.gz or .tgz file extension and are called "tarballs".
Tip: To learn information about other types of files, you can go to the MiniTool official website.
How to Open GZ File on Windows/Mac/Linux
After introducing the basic information about the GZ file, let’s see how to open a GZ file on Windows/Mac/Linux.
How to Open GZ file on Windows
To open the GZ file on a Windows computer, there are 2 ways for you.
Way 1: Via Command Prompt
Step 1: Type cmd in the Search box and choose Run as administrator .
Step 2: Type the following command. You need to replace SOURCE with the source GZ file and DESTINATION with the target folder and press the Enter key.
tar -xvzf SOURCE -C DESTINATION
Way 2: Via WinZip
Step 1: Run WinZip and open the GZ file by clicking File > Open . Alternatively, you can also double-click the GZ file with the WinZip file extension to open it.
Tip: If you run other file extractors like ALZip , open the compressed file by following the above step too.