How to unpack a tar file in Windows

Introduction

Source code is often packed for download as a TAR (Tape ARchive) file, that is a standard format in the Unix/Linux world. These files have a .tar extension; they can also be compressed, the extension is .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 in these cases. There are several ways to unpack these files.

tar

If you have MinGW/MSYS or Cygwin installed, you can use the tar command to unpack such files:

  tar xvf  <.tar file>
  tar xzvf <.tar.gz file>
  tar xjvf <.tar.bz2 file>

See the tar man page for more information.

7-Zip

Another option is to install 7-Zip, which has a nice graphical user interface. 7-Zip can also be used to unpack many other formats and to create tar files (amongst others).

1. Download and install 7-Zip from 7-zip.org. If you do not want to use 7-Zip as a command line tool, skip the next steps.
2. Add the directory you installed 7-Zip into to your path (Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables).
3. Move the tar file to the directory you wish to unpack into (usually the tar file will put everything into a directory inside this directory).
4. Open a command prompt, and cd to the directory.
5. If the tar file is compressed, type 7z x filename.tar.gz at the command prompt (where filename.tar.gz is the name of the compressed tar file). This results in a tar file called filename.tar
6. Type 7z x filename.tar at the command prompt (where filename.tar is the name of the tar file).

Instead of using 7-Zip on the command line, you can use the file manager and click on a .tar, .tar.gz, or.tar.bz2 file; 7-Zip will automatically start.