Let me say a few words about .tar files. .tar is a truly old file extension. It harkens back to the good old times when hard drives were a pricy oddity and tapes ruled the field of long-term data storage. In fact, “TAR” is an acronym for tape archive. On the other hand, despite it’s telling acronym, it probably woun’t be considered a “real” archive by most contemporary users because it offers no compression. A .tar file is, in essence, just a bunch of other files strung together.

Since a TAR file offers no compression functionality 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 sometimes you might need several applications to uzip a .tar file - for example, a rar converter is rarely needed, but sometimes required.

Lets get down to the important question. To extract a “plain” TAR archive on a Linux-like 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 file formats easily. With WinRAR extracting a TAR file is as easy as right-click + “Extract here”.

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.

Make Money

Related posts:

1. Fight Fungal Infections With Olive Leaf Extract Also known as oleuropein, Olive leaf extract comes from...
2. I’ve Picked Up A Couple Of Suggestions About Virus Protection Computer Programs There are a number of very helpful software tools...
3. The Best Way To Handle Damaged Data Recovery Damaged files recovery is realistic when you move quickly...
4. Are you interested in converting PDF To .doc? There’s a lot of people in the world interested...
5. NYC State Income Tax Return Form for 2009, 2010 The state of New York department of taxation and...