TAR.GZ to TAR

Nothing you choose here leaves your browser, and nothing is downloaded to make it work — not a library, not a compression module, nothing. Your browser already knows how to deflate and gzip; this page writes the TAR around it.

…or drop one anywhere on this page.

Just the gzip removed, leaving the tar underneath.

Nothing is lost and nothing is rearranged — this is gunzip and no more. The file gets larger, which is the only reason to think twice. Useful when a tool wants an uncompressed tar, or when you want to look at what is inside without unpacking.

How this works, and why nothing is fetched

A tar is a 512-byte header before each file and the bytes after it, so this page writes it outright — there is no compression involved and nothing to fetch. Reading the TAR.GZ uses your browser's own decompressor, which it already has for web pages.

What it will not do

It will not open a RAR, and nothing ever writes one: RARLAB's licence forbids using their code to re-create the RAR algorithm, which is proprietary. That is a legal restriction and not a difficulty. It will not open a 7z, bzip2 or xz either — those need compressors your browser does not have, so supporting them would mean shipping one, which is the thing this page avoids. It says which of these it is looking at rather than just refusing.

It does not open password-protected archives, and it says so per file rather than failing silently. It reads plain ZIPs rather than ZIP64, so an archive over 4 GB or with more than 65,535 files is refused with that reason given.

Where to go next