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I use to receive tar.gz files fromm colleagues but unpacking them with 7zip is not convenient as it unpacks a tar file from gz first while I usually seek to get the tar file contents (so I have to unpack the tar file explicitly next).

I've tried adding tar -zxvf %P%N command to Total Commander button bar but it turned that tar -zxvf doesn't work but returns the following error (tried it in bare command prompt):

tar: Cannot fork: Function not implemented
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

I have got both GnuWin32 and cygwin installed, but I seek a solution that will work in Windows command line promt (and so will be callable from Totat Commander), not in cygwin command line promt.

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2 Answers 2

up vote 2 down vote accepted

To extract .tar and .tar.gz files on Windows 9x/NT/2000/ME/XP/Win7 use PowerArchiver 6.1 (freeware) or 7-zip (freeware) or Winzip (commercial).


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Your answer does not answer my question directly (I have explicitly specified that I need a command line solution and that I indeed use 7-zip already but am not satisfied by the experience in case of tar.gz files). But I've found the answer I was looking for in the article you've linked: TarTool is exactly what I need. –  Ivan Dec 26 '12 at 19:36

This happens because you have like multiple tar.exe, and one of them might be provided by git on windows. In terms of fixing this problem, you might want to adjust the order of path. Try putting the path for the real tar at the beginning of the PATH env.

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You can determine the location of tar is being called from by running where tar in command prompt. –  Dracs Aug 19 at 1:21

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