XZ is another compression method used to compress data. There are several ways on how to decompress XZ archive on Linux. For a tarball XZ compressed archive first try a tar command with xf options. This way a tar command will try automatically guess a compression method. Before you run the above command firs install XZ tools:
# apt-get install xz-utils
Otherwise, you will receive error message output:
tar (child): xz: Cannot exec: No such file or directory
tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
To extract XZ tarball run:
$ tar xf myarchive.tar.xz
If from some reason tar command fails to detect a correct decompression method use J directly specify XZ compression:
$ tar xJf myarchive.tar.xz
Next, solutions is to use XZ decompression tool unxz. It will first decompress XZ compression and leave you with a uncompressed tarball:
$ unxz myarchive.tar.xz
$ ls
myarchive.tar
Of course the last XZ decompression method will work not only for tarball but for any other XZ compressed data.
