You just downloaded a massive archive, and instead of the usual .zip or .rar, it's a .tar. Or worse, a .tar.gz. If you're a long-time Windows user, your first instinct might be to double-click and hope for the best. Usually, Windows just stares back at you with that "How do you want to open this file?" prompt. It’s annoying. It feels like you’ve stumbled into a Linux convention without an invite. Honestly, the open tar file windows experience used to be a total nightmare involving third-party sketchy freeware.
But things changed.
A TAR file—short for Tape Archive—is a relic from the days of literal magnetic tapes. It doesn't actually compress files by default; it just bundles them together into one big bucket. This is why you often see them paired with Gzip (.gz) to actually shrink the size. Dealing with them on Windows is actually pretty easy now if you know where to look.
The Built-In Way: Using Tar in Command Prompt
Most people don't realize that Microsoft actually baked a native tar tool into Windows 10 and 11. You don't need to download anything. Seriously. Since build 17063, the tar.exe utility has been sitting there in your System32 folder, waiting for some love.
Open your Command Prompt. You can do this by hitting the Windows Key and typing "cmd."
Once that black box is open, navigate to where your file is. Let’s say your file is named backup.tar and it's sitting on your desktop. You'd type:
tar -xvf backup.tar
The flags there actually mean something. -x tells the computer to extract. -v stands for "verbose," which basically means the computer will talk to you and show you what it’s doing. -f tells it you’re specifying a file name. It’s fast. It’s clean. It’s built-in. If you’re comfortable with a keyboard, this is the most "expert" way to handle it.
Why Does File Explorer Struggle Sometimes?
Windows 11 recently added native support for RAR, 7-zip, and TAR files directly inside the File Explorer. It’s a huge "finally" moment. In theory, you should be able to right-click and hit "Extract All."
But here’s the catch.
Sometimes it’s incredibly slow. If you have a TAR file with ten thousand tiny source code files, File Explorer might hang. It feels like it’s overthinking every single bit. Microsoft’s implementation uses the libarchive open-source project, which is solid, but the shell integration (the UI you see) can be clunky with deeply nested folders. If you see a progress bar that says it will take "4 hours" for a 50MB file, just cancel it. Move on to a dedicated tool.
The Old Reliable: 7-Zip
If the command line makes you nervous, just get 7-Zip. It’s the gold standard. It’s open-source, it’s free, and it has no annoying pop-ups asking for money like WinZip or WinRAR. Igor Pavlov, the developer, has kept it remarkably lightweight since 1999.
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When you install 7-Zip, it adds a cascading menu to your right-click options. To open tar file windows style with 7-Zip:
- Right-click the file.
- Hover over "7-Zip."
- Select "Extract files..." or "Extract here."
One weird quirk: if your file is a .tar.gz, you sometimes have to do this twice. The first pass "un-gzips" it into a regular .tar, and the second pass actually extracts the folders. It’s a bit of a "Russian nesting doll" situation.
Power Users and WSL
If you’re a developer, you probably already have WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) installed. If not, maybe you should. WSL allows you to run a genuine Linux environment inside Windows.
Why bother? Because Linux handles TAR files like a native language. In a WSL terminal (Ubuntu, for example), the tar command is even more robust. It handles symbolic links and file permissions in a way that the standard Windows environment sometimes messes up. If you are extracting a project meant for a web server, using WSL ensures that your file permissions don’t get stripped away by the Windows NTFS file system.
Common Pitfalls and Broken Headers
Sometimes you try to open a file and get a "Header Error." This usually means the download was interrupted. Since TAR files are just a continuous stream of data, if the end of the file is missing, the whole thing is effectively "corrupted" to most extractors.
Before you panic:
- Check the file size against the source.
- Try a different browser to download.
- Use a tool like
chkdskif you suspect your hard drive is acting up.
Another thing: long file paths. Windows has a 260-character limit on file paths. If your TAR file has a folder structure that is 10 levels deep with long names, the extraction will fail. To fix this, move the TAR file to the root of your drive (like C:\temp) and extract it there to save some character space.
Actionable Next Steps
Stop looking for "Free TAR Opener" on the Microsoft Store; those apps are often riddled with ads. Instead, follow this workflow:
- For a quick one-off: Right-click the file in Windows 11 and try "Extract All." If it works in under a minute, you're golden.
- For speed and reliability: Download 7-Zip. It is the only archive tool you will ever truly need.
- For automation: Use the Command Prompt
tar -xvfcommand. You can put this in a.batfile if you have to extract files regularly. - Check the extension: If it’s
.tar.gzor.tgz, remember that it is compressed. If it’s just.tar, it’s just a bundle.
If you deal with these files daily, consider enabling "Long Paths" in the Windows Registry. It prevents those annoying "Path too long" errors that plague developers extracting Linux-centric archives onto Windows machines.