Tar For Windows Now

For decades, Windows users relied on third-party utilities like 7-Zip or WinRAR to handle "tarballs," the standard archive format for Linux and Unix-like systems. However, modern versions of Windows now include native support for the tar command, making it easier than ever to manage these files directly from the command line or File Explorer. What is "Tar for Windows"?

tar --version

While TAR is an excellent archiving tool, there are alternative options available on Windows: tar for windows

# Invoke tar from PowerShell & tar.exe -czf backup.tgz "C:\Projects"

Expected output: tar (GNU tar) 1.32 or higher. For decades, Windows users relied on third-party utilities

Here are some basic TAR commands to get you started:

Historically, the .tar format was designed for magnetic tape drives, prioritizing the streaming of data over random access. It creates a single, uncompressed archive of multiple files, which is almost always subsequently compressed using a utility like gzip (resulting in .tar.gz ) or bzip2 (resulting in .tar.bz2 ). For a long time, Windows could not natively handle these files. A Windows user attempting to open a source code distribution from the internet would be met with a blank stare from File Explorer. This necessitated the installation of third-party tools. Applications like 7-Zip became essential software for any power user, bridging the gap by decompressing the "tarball" in two steps: first unzipping, then untarring. tar --version While TAR is an excellent archiving

choco install tar # or choco install gnuwin32-tar

Windows tar with gzip or zstd is faster than traditional Windows archiving cmdlets and competitive with third-party tools. It excels at handling large file counts due to low overhead.