AnyFormat

00 TAR → ZIP

TAR to ZIP

Unix archives, on a machine that is not Unix.

Drop files or a folder here

or choose from your device · paste with ⌘V / Ctrl+V

.tar .gz .tgz .bz2 .tbz2 .xz .txz .zst

03Options 2

Used to decrypt the entries in this tab. It is never transmitted — which is exactly why you should not type an archive password into an upload-based converter.

Faster, and sensible when the contents are already compressed — photographs, video, or another archive. The ZIP will be about the size of its contents.

  • No upload The conversion runs in this tab. Your file never travels — not to us, and not to the advertising.
  • No sign-up, no email, no daily cap There is no account system to sign up to.
  • No size limit we invented Only your device's memory — about ~2 GB on a desktop browser, ~400 MB on a phone.
  • Turn your Wi-Fi off and convert anyway The conversion needs nothing but this page. Ads will not load without a connection; your file will still convert. That is the whole claim, and it takes five seconds to check.

Repacks a TAR — plain, or compressed as .tar.gz, .tgz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz or .tar.zst — into a ZIP that Windows opens natively. The compression wrapper is detected from the file itself, so the extension does not have to be right.

Why a TAR is nearly always two formats

TAR does not compress. It concatenates files into one stream along with their permissions, ownership and timestamps, which is why it survives as the Unix packaging format — it preserves exactly what a Unix system cares about.

Compression is then applied to the whole stream by a separate program, which is where .tar.gz, .tar.bz2 and .tar.xz come from. Both layers are unwrapped here.

The consequence is that a .tar.gz cannot be listed without decompressing all of it, unlike a ZIP, whose index sits at the end. That is a genuine design difference, not an implementation limit.

What is kept and what is not

Every file comes out byte for byte identical. Nothing inside the archive is decoded, recompressed or touched — a JPEG stays the same JPEG, a database stays the same database.

The folder structure is kept, including nesting. Files are written back under the same paths they had inside.

What does not survive the change of container is everything Unix-specific: file permissions, ownership, and the executable bit. ZIP can store some of that and most Windows tools ignore it, so relying on it would be worse than saying plainly that it is gone. Symbolic links are skipped rather than turned into broken files, and you are told which ones.

Permissions do not survive, and sometimes that matters

A TAR records the mode, owner and group of every file. ZIP has no portable equivalent, and Windows tools ignore what it does have.

For a folder of documents this is irrelevant. For a source tree with executable scripts, or a backup you intend to restore onto a Unix machine, it is not — the executable bit will be gone. Keep the TAR for that job; convert a copy for the person who needs to read it on Windows.

Paths inside archives are not trusted

An entry inside an archive can claim any path it likes, including ../../.ssh/authorized_keys. Extractors that join that onto a destination folder write outside it, which is a real and long-standing class of attack.

Nothing here writes to your disk, so the archive cannot reach anything on your machine. But the ZIP produced would carry the traversal onward to whatever unpacks it next, so entries with escaping paths are dropped and named in the result rather than passed along.

The same reasoning is behind the ceilings on entry count and unpacked size: an archive that expands to a hundred times its size is a decompression bomb, and stopping is the correct response.

Other names for this

Also searched as “tar.gz to zip”, “tgz to zip”, “gz to zip”, “tar gz to zip”.

Questions

Is my archive uploaded?
No. It is opened and repacked inside this tab. An archive is usually the whole of something — a project, a case file, a set of photographs — so uploading one to a converter hands over all of it at once. Turn your Wi-Fi off before you start and this still works.
Does it handle .tar.gz and .tgz?
Yes, along with .tar.bz2, .tar.xz and .tar.zst. The compression is detected from the file’s own bytes, so a wrongly-named file still works.
Will file permissions be preserved?
No. ZIP has no portable way to carry Unix modes, and pretending otherwise would produce a restore that silently loses the executable bit. Keep the original TAR if permissions matter.
Can it open password-protected archives?
Yes — enter the password in the options. Encrypted entries are otherwise skipped and you are told how many. The password is used here and never sent anywhere, which is the whole argument for a local tool: uploading an encrypted archive together with its password to a stranger’s server defeats the encryption entirely.
Is there a size limit?
Your device’s memory, and a deliberate ceiling of 2 GB unpacked and 20,000 files. Those are not commercial limits — they are the point past which a browser tab stops being the right tool, and past which the file is more likely to be a decompression bomb than a real archive.