How to use .tar files

The .tar file extension iden­ti­fies archive files created with the tar program. The files often have ad­di­tion­al ex­ten­sions such as tar.gz or tar.Z. To open these types of files, you can use most standard zip programs.

If you come across a file with the .tar file extension, you’ll know im­me­di­ate­ly that it is an archive file. The .tar file extension refers to the term tape archiver. A .tar file is a container which can store files, folders and other objects in an archive. Since the Unix program doesn’t com­pro­mise anything, the packing and unpacking times are short. In col­lo­qui­al speech, .tar files are also known as tarballs. They are often used together with com­pres­sion programs such as gzip or Izma, which is why this file format sometimes has ad­di­tion­al endings such as tar.gz or tar.Z.

Most modern operating systems support .tar files. With Windows 10, Windows made it possible for users to process tar files without having to install any ad­di­tion­al software. A tool to process .tar files is also included in the standard in­stal­la­tion of Ubuntu. The big advantage of this file type, when compared to other similar archive formats, is that user per­mis­sions can also be included when packing data. If the source and des­ti­na­tion support Unix file per­mis­sions, these can also be used when unpacking the data. Although the program itself doesn’t use any com­pres­sion tech­nol­o­gy, this can be done by combining it with a com­pres­sion program. The data is written se­quen­tial­ly in an archive and requires much less space after being com­pressed.

If you want to open a .tar file, you can do so by doing the following:

You don’t need any ad­di­tion­al software to open a .tar file on a Mac. Simply double click on the .tar file you want to open, and the operating system’s archiving program will open it for you.

The same applies to Linux. You don’t need any ad­di­tion­al software to open a .tar file. However, the unpacking is done via the terminal. To do this, open the terminal, then use the cd command to go to the folder con­tain­ing the .tar file. Once there, enter the following command: “tar -xvzf FILE NAME.tar”.

On Windows, you’ll have to go about opening a .tar file dif­fer­ent­ly. Although you need to use external software, you can open a .tar file as you would open a .zip file or open a 7z file. To do so, download and install WinRAR, WinZip or a WinZip al­ter­na­tive. Most suitable programs are com­plete­ly free or offer a free trial version. Once you’ve installed the software, you can double click on the .tar file and the data will au­to­mat­i­cal­ly be unpacked. If that doesn’t work, right click on the file and choose the program from the “Open with” option and then select “Choose another app”.

There are numerous programs you can use to open a .tar file. Here are some options:

• 7-Zip
• Advanced Archive Repair
• Advanced TAR Repair
• ALZip
• CD Systems
• GNU Tar
• iArchiver
• IZArc
• Keka
• PeaZip
• sArchiver
• tar
• The Unar­chiv­er
• WinAce
• WinRAR
• WinZip
• Xarchiver
• Zipeg
• ZipZag