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.tar

Low risk

Tape Archive

A Unix-born archive format. Plain tar is uncompressed and is commonly paired with gzip or xz to produce `.tar.gz` / `.tar.xz`.

MIME types

  • application/x-tar

Category

archive

What opens this file

  • tar CLI
  • 7-Zip
  • The Unarchiver
  • Finder (macOS)

How to open by OS

Windows

  • Windows 10 1803 and later ship a built-in tar. For a GUI, 7-Zip is the reliable choice.

Mac

  • Double-click to extract. The CLI uses tar.

Linux

  • tar is universally present.

Ios

  • Files.app can extract on iOS 13+.

Android

  • Use ZArchiver or similar.

Safety notes

  • tar supports absolute paths, which has historically enabled path-traversal attacks overwriting /etc/passwd etc. Extract unknown tars with flags like --no-overwrite-dir.

Common mistakes

  • Extracting .tar.gz with just tar leaves a compressed blob — two-step extraction is required, or use tar -xzf.
  • Tar preserves Unix permissions, but Windows drops them on extract. Don't rely on permissions across OSes.

Related extensions

References