Extracting .xz archive fails

I’m trying to extract an .xz archive (from Download — GNU Guix ) . When doubleclicking on nautilus, the resulting folder is empty. On a terminal, doing tar -xf file.xz fails with message:

tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

Is it a problem with this specific archive file? Thanks for any help.

EDIT: mispelled file extension

Which exact file are you downloading from there? I tried the tar.xz and it tests fine for me, but note that not all of the files are tarballs – some are xz compressed iso and vm images.

I donwloaded qemu image https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guix/guix-system-vm-image-1.2.0.x86_64-linux.xz .
Searching online I thought tar -xf would extract the compressed file. Is there another command?

EDIT: Oh, it doesn’t have .tar in the extension, so I guess it’s not a tar…

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Right, exactly. You should just need to use xz -d to get the uncompressed image.

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Thank you! Weird that nautilus wasn’t able to decompress it by itself.

An xz package can be extracted with “ar” or with “xz”. Read the man pages for options to use.

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