What is the difference between .tar and .tgz?

TAR itself does not compress — it just bundles files together. .tgz (or .tar.gz) means the tar archive was additionally compressed with gzip. The viewer reads the uncompressed tar structure.

Are my TAR files uploaded?

No. The archive stays on your device and is read locally in the browser. Only the public sample archive is requested from the server.

Does TAR compress files?

No. TAR is an uncompressed container (a concatenation of files with headers). Compression is applied separately, producing .tar.gz / .tgz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz and similar combined files.

Elysia Tools

Navigation

TAR Viewer

Free online TAR viewer. Open .tar and .tgz archives in your browser to list and inspect contents — no upload, no extraction.

.tar.tgz

Sample Archive

Loading viewer…

Try a sample file

Tool usage guide

About this file format

TAR (.tar, .tgz), short for Tape ARchive, was created in 1979 for Unix tape backups. It concatenates files into a single stream with headers preserving names, permissions and timestamps, but does not itself compress. Compressed variants like .tar.gz / .tgz (gzip) and .tar.xz (xz) combine TAR with a compression layer and are the standard for source distributions and Linux packages.

TAR Viewer

About this file format

Other file viewers

TAR Viewer

Overview

When to use

How it works

Use cases

FAQ

ZIP Viewer

7Z Viewer

RAR Viewer

GZ Viewer

BZ2 Viewer

XZ Viewer