Extract .tar Files Online

How to extract a tar file online (free)

1. Drop your .tar file onto the box above, or click to choose it.
2. The contents appear as a folder tree. Open folders, search for a name, or click a file to preview it.
3. Download the file you were after, a ticked selection, or everything — as a .zip, .7z, .tar.gz or .tar, or into a folder in Chrome and Edge.

What’s a tar file, anyway?

tar (“tape archive”) is the Unix way of bundling many files into one while keeping their paths. On its own it doesn’t compress anything, which is why you mostly meet it as a compressed tarball like .tar.gz. This tool, running on 7-Zip compiled to WebAssembly, opens both: plain tars directly, and tarballs compressed with gzip, bzip2, xz, Zstandard, LZ4, .Z or LZMA, which are unwrapped automatically so you see the files rather than an inner .tar.

Handy for more than downloads

Plenty of developer artifacts are tar files under another name: the output of docker save and docker export, backups, CI build artifacts. Drop one in to see what it contains without touching a terminal. An archive stored inside the tar can be opened in place, with a breadcrumb back to the outer one.

Large tar files

A tar is read from your disk in pieces rather than loaded into memory, and only the files you ask for are copied out. A 4.7 GB .tar has been opened and repacked this way. What you extract is written to your browser’s temporary storage first, so it needs free disk space, not RAM. Unix permissions and symbolic links recorded in the tar are not applied to the files you download.

Frequently asked questions

What is a .tar file?

A tar archive bundles many files and folders into a single file while preserving the directory structure. Unlike ZIP, tar itself does not compress, which is why tarballs are usually gzipped into .tar.gz.

How do I open a tar file without the command line?

Drop it on this page. The archive is read in your browser and shown as a folder tree, with no tar command, terminal or extra software.

Can it open Docker image exports?

Yes. Files produced by docker save or docker export are plain tar archives, so you can drop one in and browse the files inside.

Does it handle compressed tarballs?

Yes. Gzip (.tar.gz, .tgz), bzip2 (.tar.bz2), xz (.tar.xz), Zstandard (.tar.zst) and LZ4 (.tar.lz4) tarballs are unwrapped automatically.

Are my files uploaded to a server?

No. Everything runs locally in your browser with WebAssembly. Your files never leave your device, and the page keeps working offline once it has loaded.

Is there a size limit?

There is no fixed cap, and no 2 GB limit. The tar is read from disk in pieces and extracted files go to your browser’s temporary storage, so the practical limit is the free space there. Some private-browsing modes lack that storage and fall back to memory, where large archives may fail.