How to open TGZ files on Windows 10
Files can be compressed into different formats. The ZIP and RAR formats are the more common formats but there are plenty of other compression formats and you may encounter some of them now and then. File compression apps support quite a number of formats and chances are your app of choice can extract as many or more types of compressed files as it supports.
TGZ files on Windows 10
TGZ is a compressed file format that you will find on Linux systems. You won’t find it too often on a Windows 10 system but compression apps for Windows 10 can compress and extract TGZ files. If you already have a compression tool installed on your system, it’s worth checking to see if supports extracting a TGZ file. If not, try the following apps.
Compress TGZ files
If you want to compress a file to the TGZ file format, you can do so with the free app called 7zip. It’s a two step process where you will have to compress the file twice. It’s not the most elegant or quickest solution but 7zip has a GUI which should make this quick.
- Open File Explorer.
- Right-click the file/folder that you want to compress.
- Select 7zip from the context menu and select Add to archive from the sub-menu.
- Open the Archive format dropdown and select TAR.
- Go ahead and compress the file.
- Once compressed, right-click the newly created TAR file.
- Select 7zip from the context menu and select Add to archive from the sub-menu.
- Open the Archive format dropdown and select gzip.
- Proceed with the file compression.
- The output file will be in the Tar.gz file format.
7zip
7zip is an excellent compression and extraction tool. It’s lightweight and you can use it to extract a TGZ file.
- Download and install 7zip.
- Open File Explorer and right-click the TGZ file you want to extract.
- Select 7zip from the context menu.
- Select Extract to “folder name.tar”.
- The file will extract to the a TAR file.
- Right-click the TAR file and select 7zip.
- Select Extract to ‘folder name”.
- The file/folder will be extracted.
WinRAR
If you do not like extracting the TGZ file in two steps, you can use WinRAR. It can extract them in one step.
- Download and install WinRAR.
- Open File Explorer and navigate to the TGZ file you want to extract.
- Right-click the TGZ file and select WinRAR Extract to “folder name”.
Conclusion
If you want to compress files to the TGZ format on Windows 10, you will have to compress them in two steps but with extraction, you have the choice to extract in one step or two. It will boil down to whichever app you already have installed. The compression and extraction isn’t any different between the apps.
