Drop any file to identify it
No upload. No signup. No sending your file halfway across the internet.
We tell you what it is, right here in your browser.
Drop it!
Let go to identify this file.
Couldn't identify this file
Need to convert it? fwip it →
A .tgz file is a .tar.gz by another name — a TAR archive (bundling files and directories with permissions preserved) compressed with gzip. The single extension exists because some systems (notably older Windows) couldn't handle double extensions. On Unix/Linux, .tgz and .tar.gz are treated identically.
This is the default distribution format for source code releases on Unix/Linux. Download a project's source, `tar xzf project.tgz`, and you have the source tree with all permissions intact. The 'x' extracts, 'z' decompresses gzip, and 'f' specifies the file. It's been the standard since before most developers were born.
Every Unix/Linux system handles .tgz natively. macOS Archive Utility extracts them with a double-click. On Windows, 7-Zip and WinRAR open .tgz files. For better compression at the cost of speed, .tar.xz (xz compression) is increasingly used for large source distributions.