Programmatically extract tar.gz in a single step (on Windows with 7-Zip)

Question

Problem: I would like to be able to extract tar.gz files in a single step. This makes my question almost identical to this one: Stack Overflow qu

Answer 1

As you can see 7-Zip is not very good at this. People have been asking for tarball atomic operation since 2009. As an alternative, you can use the Arc program. Example command:

arc unarchive test.tar.gz

Answer 2

7z e example.tar.gz  && 7z x example.tar

Use && to combine two commands in one step. Use the 7-Zip portable (you will need 7z.exe and 7z.dll only).

Answer 3

Old question, but I was struggling with it today so here's my 2c. The 7zip commandline tool "7z.exe" (I have v9.22 installed) can write to stdout and read from stdin so you can do without the intermediate tar file by using a pipe:

7z x "somename.tar.gz" -so | 7z x -aoa -si -ttar -o"somename"

Where:

x     = Extract with full paths command
-so   = write to stdout switch
-si   = read from stdin switch
-aoa  = Overwrite all existing files without prompt.
-ttar = Treat the stdin byte stream as a TAR file
-o    = output directory

See the help file (7-zip.chm) in the install directory for more info on the command line commands and switches.

As noted by @zespri powershell will buffer the input to the second 7z process so can consume a lot of memory if your tar file is large. i.e:

& 7z x "somename.tar.gz" -so  | & 7z x -aoa -si -ttar -o"somename"

A workaround from this SO answer if you want to do this from powershell is to pass the commands to cmd.exe:

& cmd.exe '/C 7z x "somename.tar.gz" -so | 7z x -aoa -si -ttar -o"somename"'

Answer 4

Use the win32 port of tar.

tar -xvfz filename.tar.gz

Answer 5

Since you asked for 7-zip or something similar, I am providing an alternative tool that was written for your exact use case.

The tartool utility is a free and open source tool built using the .NET SharpZipLib library.

Example commmand to extract a .tar.gz / .tgz - file,

C:\>TarTool.exe D:\sample.tar.gz ./

Disclaimer : I am the author of this utility.