What does tar -xzvf do?

• A. Extracts a gzip-compressed tar archive verbosely.
• B. Creates a gzip-compressed tar archive with verbose output.
• C. Lists contents of a gzip tar archive.
• D. Extracts an uncompressed tar archive without verbose output.

Answer: (A)

This command extracts files from a gzip-compressed tar archive and shows each file as it’s extracted. The x flag means extract, the z flag tells tar to decompress with gzip, the v flag makes tar print the names of files as it processes them, and the f flag indicates that the next argument is the archive file to use. So you typically run something like tar -xzvf archive.tar.gz to read the archive, decompress it, and write the files to the current directory while listing them as they’re created. If the archive isn’t gzip compressed, you’d omit the z flag or use a different one (for example, -xjvf for bz2, -xJvf for xz), and omitting verbose will perform the extraction without printing each filename.