What's a good tar utility for Windows?

Question

I use Cygwin regularly, but I have a need these days to extract tar.gz and tar.bz2 files on other people's Windows machines. They don't want Cygwin; they need a GUI. I've tried 7-zip, which some other people in our company were using, but 7-zip makes the braindead decision to require you to first uncompress a file to a new destination file, then untar the file, thus wasting time and disk space, and requiring extra actions on my part. And there's other things I don't like about its interface.

I just received a new Windows workstation and decided to try out the ZipGenius software the powers that be decided to provide with it, but it doesn't even handle tar.gz files.

Any suggestions on a better tool?

Answer 1

WinRAR

Answer 2

Total Commander handles .tar.gz out of the box and is just the best FileSystem manager around in my book :)

Answer 3

7Zip allows you to double click the file inside it's file manager and explore it, so you can double click the tar.bz and get the tar, and double click again to get the files inside.

Answer 4

I've always been a big fan of ZipGenius. They support TAR formats (7zip too) and it has a lot of great features. Plus it is free.

Answer 5

A good tar utility for Windows is tar. No need to involve Cygwin, either; it can run as a native program. The UnxUtils project on Sourceforge has lots of Windows versions of common Unix utilities without the need for Cygwin.

If you need a GUI, WinZip can read tarballs, and so can WinRar. They behave the same as you describe 7-Zip, though. If you open a .tar.gz file, they first unzip the file and then open the inner tar file. There's not much you can do to avoid that in a GUI. Both the tar and gz formats are streamable, which makes them perfect for, say, piping the output from gunzip into tar in order to unpack a tarball without using lots of extra disk space. But a GUI is going to offer a list of all the files in the archive, which you can't do without reading the entire tar file. A GUI will also allow you to point and click to select which single files to extract, and you can't do that without reading the entire file, either.

What a GUI could do is unzip the file in memory to create an index and then discard the data, retaining only enough to display the index. Once you select the files to extract, it would unzip the tarball a second time and write the selected data to disk. But I'm not aware of any programs that do it that way. If you're that low on disk space, use the command-line method instead.

Answer 6

Try tartool, its a simple command line utility. No tar.bz2 support yet.

Disclosure: I wrote this tool.

Answer 7

You can use 7-Zip, or PeaZip if you dislike 7-Zip's UI, both are free and open source. Another good choice may be WinRAR, it is non-free but just shows a nag screen at program's startup when the trial expires, not a big nag at all.

Answer 8

Archive eXchange from www.objectfusion.com has the best TAR support of any of the Windows software currently on the market.