Question

I used the command tar -x file.tar.gz and, for one reason or anything it failed. Then I get stuck being able to type anything in, but not being able to run any more commands. Pressing enter just gives me a new line. I don’t know how to break out of it either (escape etc doesn’t work). The only way I can get back working is to close putty and reconnect.

Is there a way to get it back to normal so I can keep going because it’s irritating closing it all the time.

Answer 1

Try hitting CTRL+C 🙂 This will cancel/kill/stop the running command!

But the best way to untar is to use -v to verbose the output :

tar -zxvf yourfile.tar.gz 

With that, you’ll perhaps see that your file just take more time than you thought unarchiving 😉