Convert RAR to TAR — Free Online Converter

RAR is Alexander Roshal's proprietary archive format, popular for its solid compression, recovery records, and multi-volume splitting. TAR (Tape Archive) is Unix's foundational file-bundling format from 1979, designed to concatenate files and directories into a single uncompressed stream while preserving permissions, ownership, symbolic links, and all Unix metadata.

Converting RAR to TAR extracts the proprietary RAR container and repackages the contents as a plain, uncompressed tar archive. This conversion removes both the proprietary format dependency and all compression, producing a raw file bundle that any Unix system can read with the built-in `tar` command and that can be subsequently compressed with any algorithm of your choice.

TAR is the base format for virtually all Unix packaging and distribution workflows. Debian packages (.deb) contain tar archives, RPM packages wrap tar, Docker images layer tar archives, and build systems consume tar input. Converting RAR to TAR makes the content accessible to all these ecosystems without proprietary tool dependencies.

Uncompressed TAR also serves as a neutral intermediate format. Once you have a .tar file, you can apply gzip (.tar.gz), bzip2 (.tar.bz2), xz (.tar.xz), or zstd (.tar.zst) compression according to your specific needs. This gives you flexibility that neither RAR nor any single compressed format can provide.

The RAR archive is decompressed using unrar, which handles both RAR4 and RAR5 format variants. All files are extracted to a temporary directory preserving the original hierarchy. The `tar` utility then bundles the extracted files into a POSIX.1-2001 (pax) format archive, writing 512-byte header blocks for each entry followed by the raw file data. No compression is applied. The output size equals the sum of all uncompressed file sizes plus tar header overhead (512 bytes per file plus padding to 512-byte boundaries).