And that’s why tar -xf is the skeleton key for almost any .tar.* file on Linux.
In the land of Linux, software often arrived not as a simple package, but as a — first tar (the tape archiver), then xz (the powerful squeezer). linux install tar.xz
Some modern .tar.xz files are pre-compiled (binaries). In that case, after extraction, the program was already inside — just run ./program_name or copy it to /usr/local/bin/ . But for source code, the five steps lived forever: unpack, enter, configure, make, install . And that’s why tar -xf is the skeleton key for almost any
sudo make install With great power, Alex placed the program into the system directories so all users could call its name from anywhere. In that case, after extraction, the program was
./configure This script checked for compilers, libraries, and dependencies. Sometimes you needed to add --prefix=/usr/local to tell the traveler where to live.
One day, a young admin named Alex downloaded app-3.2.tar.xz .