What is a good utility for windows?

Question

I use Cygwin regularly, but these days I need to extract tar.gz and tar.bz2 files to other Windows computers. They do not want Cygwin; they need a graphical interface. I tried 7-zip, which was used by some other people in our company, but 7-zip makes Braindead's solution to require that you first decompress the file into a new destination file, then decompress the file, thereby wasting time and disk space and require additional actions with my side. And other things that I don't like about its interface.

I just got a new Windows workstation and decided to try out the ZipGenius software, whose credentials should be granted, but it doesn't even process tar.gz files.

Any suggestions on a better tool?

Answer 1

7-Zip allows you to double-click a file inside its file manager and examine it, so you can double-click tar.bz and get tar and double-click to get the files inside.

Answer 2

A good tar utility for Windows is tar . No need to bring in Cygwin either; It can work as a native program. The UnxUtils project on Sourceforge has many versions of common Unix utilities for Windows without the need for Cygwin.

If you need a graphical interface, WinZip can read tarballs as well as WinRar. However, they behave the same way you described 7-Zip. If you open the .tar.gz file, first unzip the file and then open the internal tar file. Not much can be done to avoid this in the GUI. Both tar and gz formats are thread safe, which makes them ideal, for example, to output output from gunzip to tar to unpack tarball without using a lot of free disk space. But the graphical interface will offer a list of all the files in the archive, which you cannot get around without reading the entire tar file. The graphical interface also allows you to specify and select which individual files will be extracted, and you cannot do this without reading the entire file.

What the graphical user interface can do is unzip the file into memory to create an index, and then discard the data, saving enough to display the index. After selecting the files to be extracted, it will unzip the archive another time and write the selected data to disk. But I do not know about any programs that do this. If you have less disk space, use the command line method instead.

Answer 3

Total Commander processes .tar.gz out of the box and is the best FileSystem manager in my book :)

Answer 4

Winrar

Answer 5

Try tartool , it is a simple command line utility.

It’s free, and the code is open source.

Disclosure: I wrote this tool.

Answer 6

You can use 7-Zip or PeaZip if you don't like the 7-Zip interface, both are free and open source. WinRAR may be another good choice, it is not free, but it just displays a screening screen when the program starts, when the trial exam expires, rather than a big rush.

Answer 7

The eXchange archive from www.objectfusion.com has the best TAR support for any Windows software currently on the market.

Answer 8

I have always been a big fan of ZipGenius . They support TAR formats (7zip too), and it has many great features. Plus it's free.