Online .TGZ File Extractor
(No Size Limits)

A .tgz file is a .tar.gz file under a shorter name. Not a variant, not a different compression setting, byte for byte the same format. Anything that opens one opens the other, and renaming between them changes nothing.

Why the short name exists at all

Blame DOS. Early Microsoft filesystems used 8.3 filenames: up to eight characters, a single dot, then a three-character extension. The name archive.tar.gz is impossible under that rule, because it needs two dots and a two-letter final extension.

So the two extensions were folded into one that fits, and .tgz was born. The 8.3 limit has been irrelevant since the 1990s, but the convention stuck, and plenty of build scripts and release pipelines still emit .tgz today. The same logic produced .txz for .tar.xz and .tbz2 for .tar.bz2.

npm is the most common source you will meet now. Every package published to the registry is a .tgz, which is why npm pack produces one.

Extracting it

Drop the file above and it unpacks in the browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no size limit and no server holding your files afterwards. Both layers, the gzip compression and the TAR bundle underneath, come off in one pass.

From a terminal, tar recognises it without being told which compression was used:

tar -xf package.tgz

For the full detail on the format itself, including which systems open it natively and how it compares to .tar.xz and .tar.zst, see the .tar.gz page.