How does one unpack a tar file in Android?

Question

I\'m not overly familiar with tar, so, this may be a stupid question, but I have a situation where I want to grab a tarball from the server (preferably compressed, but that\'s n

Answer 1

Sorry for reviving an old question.

As of 6.0/Marshmallow, Android includes Toybox, an executable that contains small versions of every utility.

So on 6+ versions of Android, you can execute tar command as you would on a normal linux system.

As of Q1 2019, 6.0 and higher represent approximately 90% of Android users, so this is more or less safe to do unless you want full support, or are targeting a market with different Android adoption rates.