pkg.tar.xz file - how to unpack on a Unix or Windows system?

I am a newbie Unix user. I have a file whose extension is pkg.tar.xz. How can I unpack this file on Windows or Unix?

I can use Cygwin but I'm not sure which utility I'd need to use. Any ideas?

4 Answers

If you've got Cygwin installed, then create a new directory and execute the following from within it:

tar zxvf FILE.tgz

If the person who produced the file was polite, it will contain its own top-level directory. If the person was impolite, it might contains lots of files, and you want a directory to contain them all.

In cygwin, you can use the following command at the command line: tar xvJf pkg.tar.xz. EDIT: note that that's a capital J, which is the flag for LZMA (xz), not a lower-case j, which is the flag for bzip2.

In Windows, I would recommend using 7-Zip

Googling around:

7-Zip supports xz as of version 9.04 beta

From Wikipedia

That is the Arch Linux package extension; like deb for 'ubuntu, debian or mint; or rpm for suse, RHEL, and centOS.

tar -xf *.tar.xz works for simple unzip.

You don't get anything human readable.

.pkg.tar.xz IS NOT SOURCE CODE.
To actually use it like a binary: in arch linux
sudo pacman -U ~/downloads/packages/packagename-ve.rsi.onnumber.pkg.tar.xz
proceed? [yes/n]
Installing packagename.versi.on
[######################################]DONE!
[username@archlinux] $