How to extract a tar file (.tgz) in windows?

Question

How to extract a tar file (.tgz) in windows? Is this possible, or do I have to get into a linux environment and extract it?

Answer 1

No, you don't need Linux, you can download a free tool like 7zip which is more than capable of extracting tar.gz/tgz content.

And, on the assumption that you're writing batch files to do this extraction (since this is a programming site rather than a general tools help forum), it has a nice command-line interface so that you don't have to worry about GUI rubbish.

Answer 2

You can use PowerArchiver 6.1 (freeware) or 7-zip (freeware).

Answer 3

I'd go with the previously mentioned 7zip, but you can also use WinZIP.

Answer 4

I always have the UnxUtils GNU utilities in my PATH on a Windows box.

UnxUtils includes tar and gunzip programs, among other things one can't live without after getting used to a Unix shell.

Answer 5

I use Ch Shell from SoftIntegration.

Answer 6

Unfortunately I have not found 7-Zip good for unpacking tar.gz'ed archives.

I tried piping 7-Zip's gzip extract to tar extract, but this can fail on archives larger than a couple of megabytes.

7z x %1 -so | 7z x -si -ttar

Even writing to temp instead of pipe, I have encountered failures.

My search goes on. 'Ch Shell' looks promising...

Answer 7

I use Universal Extractor I use that and 7-Zip for a lot of things.