How To Unzip TAR Files
Let me say some words about TAR archives. .tar is a truly ancient file format. It harkens back to the good old times when hard disks were an expensive rarity and tapes ruled over the field of backup and storage. In fact, “TAR” means tape archive. However, despite it’s suggestive name, it probably woun’t be considered a “real” archive by many contemporary users because it offers no compression. A .tar file is, in essence, just a bunch of different files strung 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 (extension .tar.gz) and the Bzip compressor, which produces .tar.bz2 files in turn. So usually you might need more than one program to uzip a .tar file – for example, a rar converter might prove of use.
Lets get down to business. To extract a “plain” TAR archive on a Unix-based system, use this command line : “tar -xvf filename.tar”. This will unzip the contents of the file 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 running Windows, have no fear – most popular archivers can deal with .tar files. For example, WinRAR (shareware) and 7-zip (open source) can both extract .tar, .tar.gz, and several other archive formats easily. With WinRAR unzipping a TAR file is as easy as right-click followed by “Extract here” from the context menu.
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.
