![Open Open](/uploads/1/2/3/8/123889405/650658616.jpg)
![Tar Tar](http://www.e7z.org/images/tar.bz2.png)
Open/Extract TAR File with Freeware on Windows/Mac/Linux. TAR (Tape ARchive) is both a file format (in the form of a type of archive bitstream) and the name of a program used to handle such files. The format was created in the early days of Unix and standardized by POSIX.1-1988 and later POSIX.1-2001.
OS X can handle both by default from Finder. The that ships with OS X knows how to extract both formats.
Just double click on the file or Cmd-Click (or right click) on the archive and select 'Open' from the list and OS X will unarchive it. Users also have access to zip, unzip and tar from a Terminal window command line. These all come with OS X. There's also the free, and most excellent, that they can install that allows for a few more options when dealing with compressed files. It also supports a few more formats. But it's completely unnecessary for extracting gzip-compressed tar archives and zip archives.