[font=-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"]Windows doesnt (yet) have a native way to open or create tar files, so youll need an extra program to do that.7-Zipis a handy program that can pack and unpack tar files and a slew of other formats. Its lightweight, free, and open-source. You can head over to theirdownload pageto start installing it.[/font]
[font=-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"]Installation is quick and simple. This is the only prompt youll interact with when you open the installer:[/font]
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![[Image: taronwindows1.jpg]](https://dailydoseoftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/taronwindows1.jpg)
[/font][font="News Cycle", "Arial Narrow Bold", sans-serif]How to open tar files on Windows with 7-Zip[/font]
[font=-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"]Once its done installing, youll be able to right-click on tar files and see the 7-Zip options in the right-click context menu. There are a few options in this menu, including opening the archive to browse the files inside, or extract the files to a specific location. If youd just like to extract the files, you can extract them to a single folder in your current directory (the one where the tar file resides) by clicking Extract to name-of-tar-file. Heres what it looks like when we extract the contents of a file named MyFiles.tar:[/font]
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![[Image: taronwindows2.jpg]](https://dailydoseoftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/taronwindows2.jpg)
[/font][font=-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"]If you are opening a compressed tar file (one with a .gz or .bz2 or other extension), youll need to do one extra step. You have to decompress the tar file before being able to open it. So, in our MyFiles.tar.gz archive, you can see that 7-Zip first gives us the option to extract it into a base tar file: MyFiles.tar.[/font]
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![[Image: taronwindows3.jpg]](https://dailydoseoftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/taronwindows3.jpg)
[/font][font=-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"]Once the base tar file has been decompressed, you can extract its contents as shown above.[/font]
[font="News Cycle", "Arial Narrow Bold", sans-serif]How to create tar files on Windows with 7-Zip[/font]
[font=-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"]To create a tar file, you can highlight the files youd like to archive, right-click, and go to 7-Zip > Add to archive.[/font]
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![[Image: taronwindows4.jpg]](https://dailydoseoftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/taronwindows4.jpg)
[/font][font=-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"]In the Add to Archive menu, just select tar as your archive format and click OK.[/font]
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![[Image: taronwindows5.jpg]](https://dailydoseoftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/taronwindows5.jpg)
[/font][font=-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"]Youll notice that the compression level is automatically set to store and cant be changed. This means that it will archive your selected files as a .tar but will not compress them. If youd like compression (appending a .gz, .bz2, or .xz file extension), you can right-click your tar file and click Add to archive.[/font]
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![[Image: taronwindows7.jpg]](https://dailydoseoftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/taronwindows7.jpg)
[/font][font=-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"]Now, youll notice some new options under the archive format selection, which werent there when creating your base .tar file.[/font]
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![[Image: taronwindows6.jpg]](https://dailydoseoftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/taronwindows6.jpg)
[/font][font=-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"]Youll probably want to select gzip, which will create a .tar.gz file. It seems to be the most common type of tar archive, although bzip2 and xz compression are also popular choices for tar files. Even the 7z option, which will create a .tar.7z file, is becoming more widespread. If in doubt, just select gzip.[/font]