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

Noting down another option here,

Library Name : Apache Commons Compress Apache License, Version 2.0

The Apache Commons Compress library defines an API for working with ar, cpio, Unix dump, tar, zip, gzip, XZ, Pack200, bzip2, 7z, arj, lzma, snappy, DEFLATE, lz4, Brotli, Zstandard, DEFLATE64 and Z files.

Example here: Java TAR example – compress and decompress *.tar or *.tar.gz files This demonstrates how to compress files or directories recursively in .tar or .tar.gz format and how to decompress a .tar or .tar.gz file

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

I don't know if there is support for it built into the OS. But you should be able to use a third party library to do it.

Here is one, I am sure there are others to choose from out there as well.