How To Expand .Tar Files
Let me say a couple words about .tar files. .tar is a truly ancient file format. It goes back to the good old times when hard disks were an expensive rarity and tapes ruled over the field of backup and storage. In fact, “TAR” means tape archive. On the other hand, despite it’s telling acronym, it would hardly be considered a “real” archiving format by most contemporary users because it offers no data compression. A .tar file is, in essence, just a bunch of different files concatenated together.
Since a TAR file offers no compression functionality of it’s own, the files are typically compresed with an additional archiver. Common examples include Gzip (produces .tar.gz) and the Bzip compressor, which produces .tar.bz2 files in turn. This means that usually you might need several applications to extract a .tar file - for example, a rar converter might come in handy.
Lets get down to the important question. To unzip a “plain” TAR archive on a Unix-based OS, use this command line : “tar -xvf filename.tar”. This will unzip the contents of the archive 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, fear not - most popular archivers can deal with .tar files. For example, WinRAR (commercial) and 7-zip (open source) can both extract .tar, .tar.gz, and many other archive formats easily. With WinRAR unzipping a .tar archive is as easy as right-click followed by “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.