TAR Extractor

TAR, short for Tape Archive, is not a compressor but a container: it concatenates files one after another with small 512-byte headers, preserving folder structure, file sizes, timestamps and Unix permissions. Born for tape backups, it became the standard way to bundle source code and server backups on Linux and macOS — usually together with gzip, which does the actual shrinking.

TAR is bundling, not shrinking

A plain .tar file is uncompressed, so its size is roughly the sum of its files. That surprises first-timers expecting a small file. When you see .tar.gz or .tgz, tar did the bundling and gzip did the shrinking — two jobs, two layers, one download.

Dialects this tool understands

Decades of Unix history left several header flavours: the 1970s v7 format, the ustar standard, GNU long-name extensions and modern pax headers. This tool parses all of them with its own reader, so long file names and non-English characters come through correctly instead of truncated or garbled.

When you would use it

Peek inside a source tarball before building it, verify a server backup contains the right paths, or pull one config file out of a huge bundle without unpacking everything. Single files download individually; the whole tree can be repacked as a ZIP.

Honest limits

Symbolic links are listed but never followed, so an archive cannot trick the tool into writing outside its sandbox. Compressed tarballs like .tar.gz belong on the TAR.GZ page — dropping one here gives you the inner layer, not the file tree. The usual caps apply: 10 GB per upload at most, about 512 MB practical on phones and 1.5 GB on desktops.

Privacy

Parsing happens locally in your browser via WebAssembly. Your archive, its names and its permissions data never leave the device.