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Create and extract tarballs in Windows
By admin | August 12, 2008
For those of you who want to extract and create tarballs (tgz, tbz) on the Windows platform, there are many commercial tools to extract tarballs. If you want an graphical app, you can use the open-source 7-zip archiver for Windows.
However, there are also not many tools extract tarballs from the command line (cmd.exe or command.com). Below are easy steps to install a GNU Tar-like program (bsdtar) to use in the command line. BSDtar is licensed under the BSD License (as specified here).
- Download bsdtar and extract to a directory, preferably without spaces.
- Go into Control Panel -> System and click on “Advanced”. Then click on “Environmental Variables”.

- In the user variables section, add the path you extracted bsdtar to the PATH variable. If the PATH variable has not been created, create it.
- You’re done! To test it, type tar zcvf archive.tar.gz * to create a tarball (tar+gzip) of all the files in the current directory.
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Topics: Windows | 905 Comments »

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