Installing programs in Linux
When you get a Linux program, it’s usually in a .tar.gz (or .tgz) file, which is a TAR archive that has been further made into a GZIP archive. Before anything else, you must uncompress these archives, just like you need to uncompress a ZIP in DOS before you can use the files in it. The usual way of handling .tar.gz files in Linux is with this command:
gzip -cd filename | tar xfv –