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I need to open a file that sadly is only available in the .tar.gz file format and I am using Windows 7. I can unzip the file using 7-zip but after that I still have a .tar file that I can't open in Windows.

Is there any good software for opening .tar.gz files on Windows?

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It is sad that something being available in the most widely supported archive format in the world is sad to you. – Sparr Nov 27 '10 at 19:46
@Sparr: .tar.gz is not supported by the most widely spread client operating system without third party software. And on added to that, when I use it in Linux is has a very bad usability with command flags that is very hard to remeber. See Untar, ungz, gz, tar - how do you remember all the useful options? – Jonas Nov 27 '10 at 20:19
yes, but it is supported by software on more platforms than any other archive format. I cannot name an OS or distribution thereof for which you cannot download untar and gunzip binaries. I can name plenty of platforms for which there are no binaries or even sources for unzip. – Sparr Nov 28 '10 at 0:17
@Sparr: As I wrote in my question, .tar.gz is not supported in Windows without third party software. But .zip is supported and I guess that .zip is supported by Linux too. If the file had been available in the .zip format, I hadn't asked this question. – Jonas Nov 28 '10 at 13:08
Perhaps I should rephrase. I believe you put "sadly" in the wrong place. It belongs before "using". – Sparr Nov 29 '10 at 4:33
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3 Answers

up vote 8 down vote accepted

You can use 7-zip to untar the .tar file. I do that all the time.

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It doesn't work for me, but I will try to upgrade 7-zip to the latest version. – Jonas Nov 27 '10 at 15:01
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After upgrading 7-Zip from 9.16 to 9.20 it works fine. Thanks. – Jonas Nov 27 '10 at 15:12
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up vote 3 down vote

7-zip should work for you. I believe you have to untar the .tar part of the file as a second step after unzipping the .gz part.

You also may need to check your 7-zip settings...

  • Click Tools → Options
  • Go to the “System” tab.
  • Make sure “tar” and “gz” are checked off.
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Thanks, it worked after upgrading my 7-Zip from 9.16 to 9.20. – Jonas Nov 27 '10 at 15:13
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up vote 0 down vote

The problem is that when 7-zip uncompresses the tar file into a subdirectory, you have to go into the subdirectory in order to uncompress the tar file.

If you've tried to uncompress the subdirectory, it won't work of course.

There are two solutions here:

  1. Use 'extract here', not 'Extract files...'.
  2. Go into the subdirectory and extract from there.
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