Step 1: Well, locate the archive you're wanting to extract, in this example, we'll be using archive.tar.gz .

Step 2: Now that you've located your archive, fire up your favorite terminal. I'll be using BASH (Born Again SHell).

Step 3: You'll see something like this, "Dave@linux:", the format for that is, user@computer name:

Step 4: Type the following: gzip -d , so, in our example we'd use: "gzip -d /home/dave/archive.tar.gz".

Step 5: Now, we've extracted the first part of the archive, now, lets move onto the second. tar -xf ,so we'd use this "tar -xf /home/dave/archive.tar".

We now how all the files extracted from our archive keeping any directory structure, hurrah!