Extracting tar.gz files

I found this command which works a treat

tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz

f: this must be the last flag of the command, and the tar file must be immediately after. It tells tar the name and path of the compressed file.

z: tells tar to decompress the archive using gzip

x: tar can collect files or extract them. x does the latter.

v: makes tar talk a lot. Verbose output shows you all the files being extracted.