TAR.GZ to TGZ Converter

How to Convert TAR.GZ to TGZ Online

1. Upload Your TAR.GZ File: Drag and drop or click "+ Add Files" to load .tar.gz archives from your device. Batch upload is supported — rename a folder of .tar.gz files to .tgz in one pass. files are processed on our servers and deleted automatically after a few hours, not stored long term.
2. Pick TGZ as the Output: TGZ is preselected — there is nothing to re-encode. The conversion is a container rename: the same gzip-compressed tar bytes are written to a file ending in .tgz instead of .tar.gz. No decompression, no recompression, no quality loss.
3. Choose Single Archive or Individual Archives (Optional): When you upload more than one file, pick Single Archive to combine everything into one merged .tgz, or Individual Archives to rename each file separately. Defaults to one-to-one renaming for archive inputs.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and grab each .tgz individually or as a ZIP bundle. No sign-up, no watermark, no file-count limits.

Why Rename TAR.GZ to TGZ?

A .tar.gz and a .tgz file are byte-for-byte identical — both are a POSIX tar archive wrapped in a single gzip stream. The two extensions only differ in convention. The .tgz form survives from the 8.3 filename limits of MS-DOS, OS/2, and ISO 9660 CD-ROMs, where archive.tar.gz exceeded the 3-character extension cap. Today there are still real reasons to standardise on the short form:

• npm package tarballs — npm pack produces <name>-<version>.tgz, and the npm registry serves every package as a .tgz. Tools that ingest npm tarballs (private registries, Verdaccio, Artifactory, GitHub Packages) expect the single extension.
• Windows double-extension stripping — Windows Explorer and some browsers (notably older Edge) treat .tar.gz as a tar file with a stray .gz and offer to "open with" the wrong tool. Renaming to .tgz gives the OS a single canonical extension to bind a handler to.
• CD-ROM, ISO 9660, and FAT16 distribution — Joliet and Rock Ridge extensions support long filenames, but the base ISO 9660 Level 1 standard still enforces 8.3. Software shipped on archival media or burned to ISO for embedded targets is safer as .tgz.
• Make and shell glob patterns — Makefile rules with %.tgz: % are easier to write than %.tar.gz: because Make treats .tar.gz as a stem with the .gz suffix and applies built-in gzip rules you may not want.
• CI/CD artifact naming — GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and Jenkins artifact uploads sometimes URL-encode or rewrite dots; a single-extension .tgz avoids the edge cases.
• Package managers and source tarballs — Slackware packages, some Gentoo distfiles, and many legacy Unix software releases ship as .tgz because that is the historical convention for "this is the source tarball, gzipped." Renaming aligns your archive with the ecosystem expectation.

Need the reverse direction? See TGZ to TAR.GZ. To change the underlying compression instead of the extension, try TAR.GZ to ZIP or TAR.GZ to 7Z. To unpack the archive instead of renaming it, use Extract TAR.GZ.

TAR.GZ vs TGZ — They Are the Same File

Because the bytes are identical, every tool that handles one handles the other. tar, gunzip, 7-Zip, PeaZip, The Unarchiver, Windows 11's built-in tar, and bsdtar all auto-detect by the 1F 8B gzip magic bytes — the extension is purely a label for humans and file-association systems.

When to Pick Which Extension

Frequently Asked Questions

Are.tar.gz and.tgz actually the same file?

Yes — byte-for-byte identical when produced from the same source. Both are a tar archive piped through gzip; the only thing that changes between archive.tar.gz and archive.tgz is the filename. Compute an MD5 or SHA-256 of each after a rename and you will get the same hash. The GNU tar manual and the PeaZip tar reference both treat the two as interchangeable.

Why does npm always use.tgz instead of.tar.gz?

npm inherited the convention from its early Unix roots and locked it in when the registry shipped. npm pack writes <name>-<version>.tgz, the registry's tarball URLs end in .tgz, and Yarn, pnpm, and Bun all follow suit for compatibility. Renaming an arbitrary .tar.gz to .tgz is exactly what you need to feed it to a private registry like Verdaccio or to npm install./local-package.tgz.

Will renaming change the file's contents or hash?

No. The conversion only writes the same gzip-compressed tar stream under a new filename. Internal checksums (tar's per-file checksum field, gzip's CRC-32 trailer) and any GPG signatures you computed over the file contents are unaffected. SHA-256 of the file bytes is unchanged.

Can I just rename the file myself instead of using a converter?

For a single file, yes — mv archive.tar.gz archive.tgz on Linux or macOS, or a right-click rename in Windows Explorer (with "show file extensions" enabled). This online tool exists for batch renaming dozens or hundreds of files in one pass, for users on Chromebooks or locked-down work laptops where rename utilities are restricted, and for keeping the operation reversible inside an upload/download flow that does not touch the underlying disk.

Does Windows handle.tgz natively?

Windows 11 ships with the BSD tar command (since the May 2019 Windows 10 1903 update) which extracts .tgz from PowerShell or cmd via tar -xzf file.tgz. Windows Explorer's built-in archive viewer still does not open .tgz or .tar.gz with a double click — you need 7-Zip, PeaZip, WinRAR, or NanaZip for GUI extraction. Both extensions behave the same way; neither is "more compatible" on Windows.

What if my file is actually.tar.bz2 or.tar.xz, not gzip?

This converter only renames gzip-compressed tar archives. A .tar.bz2 (bzip2) becomes .tbz or .tb2, and a .tar.xz (LZMA2) becomes .txz. Mismatching the extension and compression will confuse tools that trust the extension (some Windows GUIs do) even though tar itself auto-detects. Use the dedicated Archive Converter if you need to actually recompress.

Will the file open faster or extract faster as.tgz?

No. Extraction speed depends on the gzip stream and the tar payload, not the filename. A 500 MB .tar.gz and the same file renamed to .tgz will decompress in identical time on the same machine. Any speed differences you see are measurement noise or filesystem caching.

Does this work for multi-volume tar archives (.tar.gz.001,.tar.gz.002)?

No — multi-volume archives split by split or 7-Zip's volume mode are a different beast. You need to concatenate them first (cat archive.tar.gz.* > archive.tar.gz) and then run the rename. This tool treats each uploaded file as a complete standalone archive.

Is anything uploaded to your servers?

Files are processed for the conversion and then deleted after your session ends. No account is required, there are no watermarks, no file-count limits, and no Pro tier gating the rename.