What is TAR?
Short for Tape Archive, sometimes referred to as tarball, a file with a TAR file extension is a file in the Unix Generic Archive format.
Since the TAR file format is used to store multiple files in one file, it is a popular method for archiving purposes and sending various files over the internet, such as software downloads.
The TAR file format is standard in Linux and Unix systems, but only for storing data, not compressing it.
TAR files are usually compressed after they are created, but those files become TGZ files, using the TGZ, TAR.GZ, or GZ extensions.
How to Open a TAR file
TAR files, a reasonably popular archive format, can be opened with the most popular zip / unzip tools. PeaZip and 7-Zip are the unzipped files free of my favorite supports opening files TAR and create files TAR, but check out the list of the extracted files free for some other choices.
B1 Online Archiver and WOBZIP are two other TAR openers, but they run in your browser instead of through a downloadable program. Just upload the TAR to either of these sites to extract the content.
Unix systems can open the TAR file without any external program using the following command :
Tar -xvf file.tar
Where ” file.tar ” is the name of the TAR file.
How to Create a TAR Compressed File |
What I have described on this page is just how to open or extract files from a TAR archive.
If you want to create your TAR file from folders or files, the easiest way would be to use a graphical program like 7-Zip.
As long as you’re on Linux, another option is to use the Command line to build the TAR file. However, with this command, you will also compress the TAR file, which will generate the TAR.GZ file.
This command will create a TAR.GZ file in a directory or a single file, whichever you choose:
Tar -czvf name-of-archive.tar.gz / path / to / directory-or-file
Here’s what this command is doing:
- -c: Create an archive
- -z: Use gzip to compress the archive
- -v: Allows verbose mode to show the progress of the creation
- -f: Allows you to specify the name of the repository
Here is an example if you want to create a file named files.tar.gz from a directory named / myfiles / :
Tar -czvf files.tar.gz / usr / local / myfiles
How To Convert TAR File
Zamzar and Online-Convert.com are two free file sets. Both web services, which will convert a TAR file to ZIP, 7Z, TAR.BZ2, TAR.GZ, YZ1, or CAB, among others. Most of these formats are compressed formats, which TAR does not mean that these services also work for TAR compression.
If you use one of these online converters, you will have to upload a TAR file to one of those sites. If the file is large, you can use a more specialized offline converter.
The best way to convert TAR to ISO would be to use the free AnyToISO program. It even works through a right-click context menu, so you right-click on the TAR file and then choose to convert it to an ISO file.
Considering that TAR files are the single file of multiple files, TAR for ISO conversion makes the most sense since ISO format is essentially the same file type. However, ISO images are more common and more supported than TAR, especially in Windows.
Note: TAR files are just containers for other files, similar to folders. As a result, you cannot only convert a TAR file to CSV, PDF, or another non-archive file format. To “convert” a TAR file into one of those formats is just meant to extract files from the archive, which you can do with one of the file extractors I mentioned in on.
