Extract TGZ

How to Extract a TGZ File Online

1. Upload Your TGZ File: Click "+ Add Files" or drag and drop your .tgz archive — uploads from your computer, Google Drive, or Dropbox are supported. The format is identical to .tar.gz, so npm package tarballs, Slackware-era packages, and source releases all work.
2. Review Defaults: Extract TGZ runs with sensible defaults; the page note reads, "Our defaults are optimized for the best results. We recommend you keeping the defaults unless you have a specific need." There are no codec or quality knobs — extraction is lossless by definition.
3. Click Extract: XConvert decompresses the gzip layer and unpacks the inner tar archive in one pass, preserving the original directory tree, filenames, and Unix file modes recorded in the tar header.
4. Download Files: Browse the extracted contents and download files individually, or grab everything as a single ZIP for easy reuse on Windows. Need a different container? Try TGZ to ZIP for a one-step repack.

Why Extract TGZ Online?

A .tgz file is a tar archive that has been compressed with gzip — bit-for-bit identical to .tar.gz. Wikipedia's tar article explicitly lists .tgz and .taz as gzip-compressed tar suffixes, and notes the short forms exist because "MS-DOS's 8.3 filename limitations resulted in additional conventions for naming compressed tar archives." Today both extensions appear interchangeably across Linux, macOS, and BSD ecosystems.

Extracting in the browser is useful when you don't have a Linux shell handy or don't want to install software:

• npm package tarballs — npm pack produces a <name>-<version>.tgz containing exactly the files that would be uploaded to the registry. The npm pack docs describe the output as a tarball copied to the current working directory; inspecting one before publishing or installing from a private mirror is a normal QA step.
• Linux source distributions — GNU projects, kernel patches, and most upstream releases ship as .tar.gz or .tgz (e.g. linux-6.x.tar.gz from kernel.org). Open one to read the README, COPYING, or a single header file without unpacking the whole tree to disk.
• Legacy Slackware packages — Slackware used .tgz as its native package format until Slackware 13 (2009) when it moved to .txz (xz-compressed). Older third-party packages and SlackBuilds still ship as .tgz.
• Web hosting & cPanel backups — full account backups, WordPress migrations, and database dumps are commonly delivered as .tgz because gzip is fast and universally supported on Unix hosts.
• Docker image layers — when exported via docker save or pulled from a registry, image layers are gzipped tarballs. Extracting one locally is a way to inspect what's inside a layer without running a container.
• Cross-platform sharing on Windows / Chromebooks — Windows has no built-in TGZ extractor before Windows 10 build 17063, and Chromebooks have none at all. A browser-based tool gives Windows, ChromeOS, and locked-down corporate machines a way in.

TGZ vs Other Tar-Based Archives

Ratios are illustrative — actual savings depend heavily on the input. xz's wins are largest on text-heavy source trees; on already-compressed media (JPEGs, MP4s) all three tar variants come out about the same.

TGZ vs ZIP — Which to Use?

If you'll send a .tgz to a Windows colleague, repacking as ZIP often saves them a step — try TGZ to ZIP for a one-click conversion that drops the tar+gzip layers in favor of a Windows-native container.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is .tgz exactly the same as .tar.gz?

Yes — byte-identical. .tgz is just a 3-character extension chosen for compatibility with old DOS/8.3 filename limits; the file content is a gzip-compressed tar archive in both cases. Any tool that handles one handles the other (tar -xzf file.tgz works the same as tar -xzf file.tar.gz).

Why does my .tgz file open as .tar after one extraction?

That's the gzip layer being removed. A .tgz is two layers: gzip on the outside, tar on the inside. Some Windows tools only undo the gzip step on the first double-click, leaving you with a plain .tar you have to extract again. XConvert does both layers in one pass, so you go straight from .tgz to the file tree.

Are TGZ archives encrypted or password-protected?

No. The tar+gzip format has no native encryption or password support — that's by design, since tar predates the public-key era. If you received a "password-protected" archive, it's either ZIP, RAR, 7z, or a .tgz.gpg (a tarball with a separate GPG encryption layer). For password-protected archives, see Extract ZIP or Extract 7z.

Can I extract just one file from a large TGZ?

After extraction, yes — browse the file list and download only what you need. Note that gzipped tars don't support true random access (the gzip stream has to be read from the start), so the back-end decompresses the whole archive even when you ultimately download a single file. This is a property of the format, not the tool.

How big a .tgz can I extract here?

The browser-side extractor handles archives up to several hundred MB comfortably; multi-GB archives are best handled with a local tar command, which streams the data without loading it into memory. If you hit a memory limit, try splitting the upstream archive or use Extract TAR.GZ for the same workflow with chunked uploads.

Will Unix file permissions and symlinks survive extraction?

The .tgz itself preserves Unix mode bits, owner/group, mtimes, and symlinks in the tar header. The browser extracts the file tree faithfully, but the resulting downloads land in your operating system's filesystem — which may not honor every Unix mode bit (Windows NTFS can't represent the executable bit the same way). For an exact replica including permissions, extract on the target Linux/macOS machine using tar.

Does an npm .tgz extract to the project root or to package/?

To package/. The tarball produced by npm pack always uses a top-level directory named package/, regardless of the package's actual name — npm's npm-packlist tooling sets this prefix when building the archive. That's why tar -tzf my-pkg-1.0.0.tgz lists package/package.json, package/index.js, etc. The browser extractor preserves that prefix.

Why is the extracted folder so much larger than the .tgz?

Gzip typically compresses source code, JSON, and text 60-80%, so a 10 MB .tgz of a Node project can expand to 30-50 MB. Already-compressed content (images, video, fonts, minified JS bundles) compresses very little, so a .tgz containing mostly binaries will be close to the unpacked size.

Is a .tgz the same as Slackware's .tgz package?

The container is the same — gzipped tar. A Slackware package is a regular .tgz with a specific internal layout: an install/ directory containing slack-desc and an optional doinst.sh post-install script. The browser extracts the contents fine; you'll just see the Slackware-specific files alongside the actual binaries. Modern Slackware (13+) uses .txz (xz-compressed) — for those, see Extract TAR.XZ.