Arduino 1.6.1 file extension for Linux oddity

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linuxgeek

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I downloaded and installed Arduino 1.6.1.

The downloaded file is Arduino-.1.6.1-linux64.tar.xz

WTH is ".xz" file extension?!

I guess everyone uses a gui that might try and figure out what type of file it is.
I figured, it's a download so it must be compressed (z usually denotes that), that would only make sense. gzip? No -- bzip2? No

It's just an uncompressed tar file. Strange.
 
Under unix you can type
file Arduino-.1.6.1-linux64.tar.xz
to see information about the file type, it does not look at the extension.

Also for untarring, you do not have to specify the compression, just do
tar -xvf file
x = extract
v = verbose (ie show files while untarring)
f = untar from file
 
xz is a "new" compression format based on LZMA. "tar -Jxvf <file>" is what you want. It's slowly replacing bzip2, which has a lower compression ratio and is also slower to decompress.

If you like command-line, there is atool which is a nice suite of tools, easier to use than raw tar. Just "aunpack <file>" to extract files. As a bonus, if the archive does not contain a single root directory, it'll make one so you won't ever pollute your working directory. There's a package available in most distributions (at least Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch).
 
Ahhh, ok. It was really hard to find any info on it. I must've done something stupid when I typed it into google.

Thx
 
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