Convert TAR.GZ to TAR — Free Online Converter

TAR.GZ is a gzip-compressed tar archive — the standard compressed distribution format on Unix/Linux. TAR is the underlying uncompressed archival format that bundles files with their metadata. Converting TAR.GZ to TAR simply removes the gzip compression layer, exposing the raw tar archive inside.

This is equivalent to running `gunzip archive.tar.gz` on the command line. The conversion strips DEFLATE compression to produce the uncompressed tar stream, which is useful as input to different compressors, for Docker operations, or for direct manipulation of the tar archive entries without decompression overhead.

Removing gzip compression is necessary when you want to apply a different compression algorithm. To create .tar.xz (LZMA2), .tar.bz2 (Burrows-Wheeler), or .tar.zst (Zstandard), you first need the plain .tar. Compressing an already-compressed .tar.gz with another algorithm would waste CPU and produce a larger file than compressing the raw tar directly.

Docker operations benefit from uncompressed tar layers — Docker's internal storage and layer diffing works on uncompressed tar data. Build systems that produce reproducible archives may need to manipulate tar entries directly (rewriting timestamps, adjusting permissions) without the complication of decompressing and recompressing the gzip layer.

The gzip header is read (magic bytes 1f8b, compression method, flags, timestamp), and the DEFLATE-compressed data is decompressed in a streaming fashion. The CRC32 checksum in the gzip trailer is verified against the decompressed data, and the original size field is checked for consistency. The output is the raw tar byte stream that was originally compressed — no tar parsing or modification occurs. The output file will be exactly the size stored in the gzip header (modulo 2^32).