What is a .gz file / .tar.gz file?

[Eleazar]

What is .gz file and .tar.gz file ? What are these extensions meant for ?
If anyone of you has the information about the same.....then please share it
thank you...

[Solomon]

A .gz file is a compressed file. The extension .gz stands for GNU Zip.
You have probably heard of the GNU Project, or GNU Linux.
GNU Zip or .gz is a free GNU software implementation of a compression algorithm. It's similar to Zip, but free, not proprietary. It does the same sort of job, but the compression algorithms used by GNU Zip .gz are different from those used in Zip files and so you need different software to open .gz files.

A .tar file is a Unix tape archive. That's what the extension tar comes from. It's a specification that was written long ago for archiving multiple files on magnetic tape. It includes headers that give information about the files in the archive, as well as the files themselves.

[SalVatore]

gzip (GNU zip) is a compression utility designed to be a replacement for compress. Its main advantages over compress are much better compression and freedom from patented algorithms.

gzip produces files with a .gz extension. gunzip can decompress files created by gzip, compress or pack. The detection of the input format is automatic.

[Dr. V]

A .tar.gz file is a tape archive .tar file that has been GNU Zipped.
In the Unix and Linux world, the task is performed by two separate utilities: First - run the tar utility to create a single archive .tar file,
Second - compress it using GNU Zip, which adds the .gz extension.
This is different from Zip tools and other compression utilities commonly used under Windows, where the archiving and the compression are done at the same time by a single process.

When data is archived and compressed on a Unix or Linux system, it is usually in the .tar.gz format.
Windows has no built-in support for tar archives or gz compressed files.
In order to open a tar.gz file you will need to use another application.