First, some words about .tar files. TAR is a really old file extension. It harkens back to the bad old times when hard drives were a pricy oddity and tapes ruled the field of backup and storage. In fact, “TAR” means tape archive. However, despite it’s telling name, it would hardly be considered a “real” archiving format by many contemporary users because it offers no data compression. A .tar file is basically just a number of different files strung together.

Since a TAR file offers no compression features of it’s own, the files are usually compresed with an additional archiver. Common examples include Gzip (extension .tar.gz) and Bzip2 (file extension .tar.bz2). This means that usually you might need more than one program to extract a .tar file – e.g., a rar converter may be necessary sometimes.

Lets get down to business. To extract a “plain” TAR archive on a Linux-like OS, use this command : “tar -xvf filename.tar”. This will extract the contents of the file 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, you’re even better off – most popular archivers know how to deal with .tar files. For example, WinRAR (shareware) and 7-zip (open source) can both unzip .tar, .tar.gz, and several other archive formats easily. With WinRAR extracting a .tar archive is as easy as right-click + “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.