TAR

TAR (Tape Archive) originated in UNIX in 1979 as a format for writing files to magnetic tape. It bundles multiple files and directories into a single stream while preserving file permissions and symlinks, but applies no compression of its own. In practice, tar archives are almost always compressed with gzip (.tar.gz), bzip2 (.tar.bz2), or xz (.tar.xz) to reduce size. TAR remains the standard bundling format for Linux software source code and package distributions.

File extensions	.tar
MIME type	application/x-tar
Developer	AT&T (UNIX)
First released	1979
Category	Archives
Open standard	Yes

What opens TAR files

• GNU tar (all UNIX-like systems)
• The Unarchiver (macOS)
• 7-Zip (Windows)
• Built-in on macOS and Linux

Browse File Formats

Reference details for 53 file formats — extensions, MIME types, what opens each one, and how they convert.

7Z Archives ABW Documents AI Images AVIF Images AZW3 E-books BMP Images CSS Other CSV Spreadsheets DjVu E-books DOC Documents DOCX Documents EPS Images EPUB E-books FB2 E-books GIF Images GZ Archives HEIC Images HTML Documents ICO Images ISO Archives JPG Images JSON Other Keynote Presentations Markdown Documents MOBI E-books Numbers Spreadsheets ODP Presentations ODS Spreadsheets ODT Documents OTF Other Pages Documents PDF Documents PNG Images PPT Presentations PPTX Presentations PSD Images RAR Archives RAW Images RTF Documents SVG Images TAR Archives TeX / LaTeX Documents TIFF Images TSV Spreadsheets TTF Other TXT Documents WebP Images WOFF / WOFF2 Other WPD Documents XLS Spreadsheets XLSX Spreadsheets XML Documents ZIP Archives