If you are like me and use a windows machine as your primary machine. You know what a headache it is when you finally find some snippet of code or other solution only to see that the solution is in a tar.gz file format. Sure you could purchase an archive software solution that supports the tar.gz format, but there is a free alternative, Gzip for Windows.

This is a command line utility, so there is no pretty GUI to use. For me, that is ok, I find it easier to deal with using the command line for extracting and building tar files.

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The biggest downside for me is that I just don't remember the standard command line options to use with gzip when extracting or building an archive. To fix this shortcoming in with my memory, I created 2 batch files (gzip.cmd and gunzip.cmd) that I placed in my system directory. I was able to get away with these names since the actual gzip.exe was not in my path.

Here are the contents of gzip.cmd


C:\SOME FOLDER PATH TO\gzip.exe %*
 


Once this batch file has been created, you will be able to build your own gzipped files. All you pass in the name of the file to compress.


C:\<gzip test.tar
 


If test.tar exists, then test.tar.gz is created.

Here are the contents of gunzip.cmd


C:\SOME FOLDER PATH TO\gzip -d %*
 


Once this batch file has been created, you will be able to extract gzipped files. You pass in the name of the gzip file to extract.


C:\<gunzip test.tar.gz
 


This extracts test.tar from test.tar.gz

There are a lot more command line flags available with gzip and I am sure this process can be made much better. This is just a simple solution that I use when I need to build or extract a gzipped file.

Dave