Convert TAR to TGZ — Free Online Converter

TAR is the uncompressed Unix archival format that bundles files into a single stream. TGZ is the short-extension form of tar.gz — a gzip-compressed tar archive using the .tgz filename — preferred by Slackware's package manager, Kubernetes Helm chart repositories, and embedded Linux build systems that standardize on the concise three-character extension.

Converting TAR to TGZ applies gzip compression to the raw tar stream and saves the output with the .tgz extension. The resulting file is structurally identical to .tar.gz — the only difference is the filename. This conversion serves the specific ecosystems that require the .tgz extension rather than .tar.gz.

The .tgz extension is explicitly required by Slackware Linux's package management system (installpkg, pkgtool, slackpkg), which will not recognize .tar.gz files as valid packages. Helm's chart repository specification uses .tgz as the standard chart package extension. OpenWrt's build system caches source downloads with .tgz extensions by convention.

Beyond requirements, .tgz is practically useful for scripting. Shell scripts using glob patterns like `*.tgz` are simpler than handling the compound `.tar.gz` extension, which can complicate basename extraction, extension matching, and MIME type detection. The single extension is also more portable across systems with filename handling quirks.

The TAR file is read as a raw byte stream (no internal parsing) and compressed through the gzip DEFLATE algorithm at the standard level. The compressed output is written with the .tgz extension. The internal structure is identical to what .tar.gz would produce — gzip header, DEFLATE-compressed tar data, CRC32 footer. The extension .tgz triggers no different processing in any known tool — it is purely a naming convention.