extract a tgz or tar.gz

To extract the compressed tar archive target.tar.gz into the current working directory with:

gzip -dc target.tar.gz | tar xf -

If the file was compressed with bzip2 (i.e., .tar.bz2), you can substitute the bzip2 command for gzip.

If the archive was compressed with the UNIX compress command (archive ending in .Z) you can use:

zcat target.tar.Z | tar xf -