How To Open .tar Archives
First, some words about TAR archives. TAR is a truly ancient file format. It goes back to the bad old times when HDD’s were an expensive rarity and tapes ruled over the field of backup and storage. In fact, “TAR” means tape archive. On the other hand, despite it’s telling name, it probably woun’t be considered a “real” archiving format by many modern users, as it offers no compression. A .tar file is basically just a number of different files concatenated together.
Since a TAR file offers no data compresion features by itself, the files are usually compresed with an additional archiver. Common examples include Gzip (produces .tar.gz) and the Bzip compressor, which produces .tar.bz2 files in turn. This means that sometimes you might need more than one program to uzip a .tar file – for example, a rar converter is rarely needed, but sometimes required.
Lets get down to business. To unzip a normal TAR archive on a Linux-like OS, use this command : “tar -xvf filename.tar”. This will unzip the contents of the archive in the current directory. In case the archive has been compressed with gzip (.tar.gz), you need to add the “z” flag to the aforementioned command; like this : “tar -xzvf filename.tar.gz”.
If you’re using Windows, fear not – most popular archivers can deal with .tar files. For example, WinRAR (shareware) and 7-zip (freeware) can both unzip .tar, .tar.gz, and several other file formats easily. With WinRAR unzipping a .tar archive is as easy as right-click followed by the “Extract here” menu option.
The techniques explained in this article should be enough to deal with most .tar archives you’ll ever come across. If you encounter something that wasn’t addressed here, there’s always Google, ready to answer every query.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 8:09 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.