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 archive. Sure you could purchase an archive software solution that supports the tar format, but there is a free alternative, Tar 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.

[More:]

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

Here are the contents of tar.cmd


C:\SOME FOLDER PATH TO\tar.exe -cvf %*
 


Once this batch file has been created, you will be able to build your own tar archives. You pass in the name of the tar archive to create and then the folder structure that will be stored in the archive.


C:\<tar test.tar test
 


Here are the contents of untar.cmd


C:\SOME FOLDER PATH TO\tar.exe -xvf %*
 


Once this batch file has been created, you will be able to extract tar archives. You pass in the name of the tar archive to extract.


C:\<untar test.tar
 


There are a lot more command line flags available with tar 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 tar archive.

Dave