Open TAR and TAR.GZ Files

What is a TAR file?

A TAR file packs many files and folders into one stream, and a second tool usually compresses that stream as a whole. That gives .tar.gz (or .tgz), .tar.bz2, .tar.xz, .tar.zst and .tar.lz files, which carry source code releases, backups and software packages.

This tool opens TAR and TAR.GZ files in your browser. List what is inside, or extract the files to download.

• TAR archive: a .tar file, or one compressed with gzip, bzip2, xz, Zstandard or lzip, up to 100 MiB. It reads the ustar, GNU and pax variants, including very long file names, and archives joined end to end.
• Compression: Detect automatically, or a specific format. Automatic detection reads the first bytes and works for every file this tool opens. Choose a format only to force it.
• What to do: Extract files or List contents. List shows every entry with its size, date and kind. Extract returns the files themselves.
• Only these paths: optional glob patterns, one per line or separated by commas, matched without regard to case. A pattern without a slash also matches file names in any folder, so *.csv picks every CSV file. A pattern ending in a slash, such as docs/, picks everything under that folder. Leave it empty to extract every file.
• One run extracts up to 100 files and up to 200 MiB. Asking for more is refused with the count, so you can narrow the paths.
• Each download is named after its path inside the archive, with slashes turned into dashes. Dates in the listing are in UTC.

Why use a browser page for this

TAR files come from Linux and macOS, and plenty of people receive one on a Windows laptop, a phone or a work computer where they cannot install anything. This page opens it without software, and the file never leaves your device.

It also extracts only what is safe to hand you. Entries with absolute paths or .. in their names are listed but never extracted, and so are symlinks, devices, sparse files, the ._ metadata files macOS adds, and a path that appears twice. A hard link comes out as a copy of the file it points to when that file was extracted in the same run. An archive inside the archive comes out as a file and is not opened.

Are there alternatives?

macOS, Linux and Windows 10 or later all include a tar command: tar -xf archive.tar.gz extracts everything. 7-Zip and The Unarchiver open TAR files with a few clicks.

For a .zip file, use Unzip Files on ToolkitBay. To turn a .tar.gz into a plain .tar without opening it, use Gzip Compress and Decompress, or the bzip2 and Zstd tools for .tar.bz2 and .tar.zst.

Fun facts and more info

The name is short for tape archive. tar arrived with Version 7 Unix in 1979 and was built to write files one after another onto magnetic tape, which is why a TAR file has no index.

That missing index has a cost. To reach the last file in a .tar.gz, every byte before it has to be decompressed, so this page reads at most 1 GiB of unpacked data per run.

The compression in a .tar.gz wraps the whole archive, not each file. Files that resemble each other compress together, so a TAR of a source tree is usually smaller than a ZIP of the same files.