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Archive format

TGZ converter

A .tgz file is a TAR archive compressed with Gzip — byte for byte the same thing as a .tar.gz, written with a single extension instead of two. The name exists because MS-DOS allowed only three characters after the dot, and it stuck.

Private for supported formats — processed in your browser

Convert supported files

Runs on your device

Drop TGZ files here

Batch files can each use a different output. Nothing uploads for local conversions.

Working inputs include camera RAW, browser-local audio/video, PDF, CBZ/CBR comics, office documents, ebooks, markup, 3D models, structured text, images, and archives.

Where TGZ comes from

TAR dates to 1979 and Gzip to 1992, and piping one into the other became the standard way to ship a directory on Unix almost immediately. The .tgz spelling was forced by DOS's 8.3 filenames, where `source.tar.gz` truncated to something unusable. Long filenames arrived thirty years ago and the abbreviation outlived the constraint: package managers, language toolchains and release pages still publish .tgz, npm most visibly — every package on the registry is one.

How TGZ works

  • The file is one Gzip stream (signature 1F 8B) whose decompressed content is an ordinary TAR archive.
  • Because Gzip compresses the whole TAR as a single stream, individual members cannot be extracted without decompressing everything before them — the trade for compressing across file boundaries.
  • TAR itself stores no compression and no central directory: it is 512-byte headers alternating with file data, so member order is the only index there is.
  • Unix permissions, ownership, symbolic links and modification times survive, which is why source releases use it and ZIP is a poor substitute.
  • There is no checksum over the archive as a whole; Gzip's CRC-32 covers the compressed stream, and TAR checksums only each header.

When to use TGZ

  • Downloading a source release or an npm package tarball
  • Moving a directory tree between Unix systems with permissions intact
  • Unpacking a .tgz on a machine whose tools only recognise .tar.gz
  • Converting a release archive to ZIP for someone on Windows

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Compresses across file boundaries, so many small similar files shrink far more than in ZIP
  • Preserves Unix metadata that ZIP has no standard place for
  • Universally available; nothing needs installing on any Unix-like system

Limitations

  • No random access: reading the last member means decompressing the whole archive
  • No built-in integrity check for the archive as a structure
  • The two spellings confuse tools that dispatch on extension, which is exactly why both exist here

Compatibility

Every Unix-like system reads .tgz with `tar`, and Windows has shipped bsdtar as `tar.exe` since Windows 10 1803. Novus Convert unpacks it in the browser with fflate and rewrites the contents as ZIP, TAR or TAR.GZ; nothing is uploaded and no member is executed.

TAR metadata is read; converting to ZIP keeps paths and sizes but not Unix ownership, which ZIP has no standard field for.

Convert TGZ to another format