In the "old days" of UNIX, compressing/uncompressing and archiving/unarchiving files involved cryptic commands such as tar -xvf somefile.tar. However, since those days, the masses have come to use computers, and they expect an easy to use system with graphical elements and interaction. The days of the command-line interface are distant, and expecting the average user to resort to those older methods is normally out of the question. This is where Untar steps in.

Untar is a wrapper application which acts as the front end to the 7za, tar, gzip, compress, bzip2, rar, and zip utilities. These utilities handle the complicated work, while Untar provides a pleasant and easy method to interact with the system tools.

Untar is able to uncompress files in .7z, .tar, .tar.gz, .tgz, .tar.z, .z, .gz, .svgz .Z, .tar.Z, .taz, .tar.bz, .tar.bz2, .tbz, .tbz2, .bz, .bz2, .rar, and .zip formats.

Untar is available as a free download for Mac OS X users. Source code is also included for the interested developer and is released under the GNU Public License. For those who need the additional power to also compress files, please take a look at GUI Tar.

• Uncompressing Zip files excludes the unnecessary __MACOSX files.
• Added Italian localization.

As of February 2009, Edenwaith will no longer actively develop Untar. In our efforts to focus on current and future projects, Untar has been discontinued.

Since Untar has been released under the GNU Public License, its source code will still be freely available for others to use. Thank you to everyone who has used and contributed to Untar.

Here are some recommendations for other archiving utilities:

• BetterZip
• StuffIt
• The Unarchiver